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From: mkdm
Hello everyone!
...hhhmmmm....This news seems to follow exactly the usual "habit" of Apple.
And usually I react to news like this, with words like "Damn Apple...f...ck....@#!! sh..it" and so on :)
BUT...THIS TIME, AND FOR THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT, HONESTLY I TOTALLY AGREE WITH APPLE.
I'm software developer for decades, and for many years I have a very personal point of view about modern "consumer" computer science.
And it's something similar to what, some days ago, Tim Cook said at WWDC 2018 (not literally) : Now it's the time of the software rather than hardware.
What I want to say is : What's the point in having tons and tons of super powerful hardware, like all modern PC/Tablet/Smartphone, if with these things we still can't do what this hardware could do?
Let me describe the situation with a couple of simple, negative, examples and with only one positive example...
The negative ones.
A) I have a very good PC. OK, not a true workstation, but anyway a very good desktop PC.
Equipped with a fairly good i7-7700k 4.5 Ghx, 32GB of very fast DDR4 3000Mhz Ram, and (only in theory) a super monster GPU card : the Gtx 1080 Ti with a "firepower" of 11.3 TFlops in FP32!!!!
Well...I have no words to see how BAD, fucking BAD, are the Nvidia drivers that manage that super hardware.
And, I have no words again too see how, almost ALL the software I use every day, with a very few and rare exceptions (Moi for example), are "done slapdash"!!!
B) One of the worst implementation of the entire software history, is without doubt, the very terrible OpenGL and OpenCL implementation that many, so many, computer graphic software, have!!!! Terrible to see how tons of (also very famous) software, rely on very poor implementation of that libraries.
WHY I HAVE BOUGHT A GTX 1080 TI OR WHY SOMEONE COULD SPEND 6000 USD FOR A QUADRO P6000 IF THEIR UNDERLYING GFX ROUTINES ARE SO WEAK AND "OUTDATED" ?
I repeat, OpenGL implementations, for decades, is one the worst piece of software of the entire computer science history!
Now the the positive example :
About one year ago I purchased for the very first time an Apple device, the iPad Pro 12.9 second generation, with the Apple Pencil.
BEFORE CONTINUING, I HAVE TO SAY THAT I DON'T LOVE APPLE MACHINES OR APPLE SOFTWARE/OS AND I'M NOT AN APPLE FUN.
But I decided to buy an iPad Pro because it has an incredible power when it comes to create digital paintings/drawings.
Actually is still the very best device for that kind of work. And in fact I use my iPad Pro 99% of the time only for digital painting.
WELL...AS IT SO HAPPENS, ACTUALLY THE VERY BEST AND "STATE OF THE ART" APPS FOR DIGITAL PAINTING, FIRST AND FOREMOST "PROCREATE" FOLLOWED BY "ARTSTUDIO PRO", WERE TOTALLY REWRITTEN FROM OPENGL TO METAL!!!
And, believe me, those Apps, above all Procreate, really FLY!!!!!
It's incredible to see what the software developers of these two Apps were able to obtain from the METAL api!!!!
If you have, just once, used one of that Apps you should know what I'm talking about.
And with a device that has only 4GB of Ram (3.88 free to be precise)
So...Apple want to force all the Apps to move from the "weak" and "old" OpenGL to METAL ?
I totally agree.
Software, rather than (wasted) hardware.
My very personal opinion.
Ciao!
Marco (mkdm)
From: YANNADA
Wow thats great news. Michael it seems once again you have made the right move :)
Driven by the Apple announcements I suspect bgfx ought to get a few page hits.
>I am myself far more worried if they give up on Intel CPUs and try to switch to ARM only
Oh I Remember when Apple's transition from the PowerPC architecture to Intel processors, Wasn't That Fun?
Image Attachments:
bgfx.jpg
From: Metin Seven (METINSEVEN)
Hi,
Marco, good points! I'm a Mac user, and OpenGL and OpenCL support for MacOS has been relatively crappy for years now.
Michael, I'm pleased to read that BGFX also supports Metal. I have to say that my non-developer impression of Metal is quite positive, especially the new version 2. My experience with Metal comes from the free AMD Radeon ProRender renderer which is compatible with multiple 3D editors, including Blender, Maya and Cinema 4D. Since they recently decided to switch to Metal 2 for MacOS, it renders blazingly fast on my AMD GPU.
More about Radeon ProRender can be found here:
https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/
From: Frenchy Pilou (PILOU)
It's not my play field but seems MoltenVK permit to use Metal on other OS !
(Open source and free! ;)
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
From: Michael Gibson
Hi yannada,
> Wow thats great news. Michael it seems once again you have made the right move :)
Yup, it has definitely turned out to be the right choice. I wasn't sure at first because it's very much focused on games. But with some relatively minor changes it's been great.
I already knew I needed to be able to target different system APIs because OpenGL is not a good choice for Windows due to poor quality drivers being very common.
> Driven by the Apple announcements I suspect bgfx ought to get a few page hits.
Yup, probably. It has already been gaining a lot of momentum in the indie game dev community.
- Michael
From: Michael Gibson
Hi Pilou,
> It's not my play field but seems MoltenVK permit to use Metal on other OS !
> (Open source and free! ;)
>
>
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
Actually no that's not for running Metal on another OS, it's for using another API called Vulkan on Mac.
Vulkan is a new API that is in some ways a kind of successor to OpenGL in that it's meant to be cross platform. It's very new though and drivers don't seem to have reached maturity yet. Another big hole was no Vulkan implementation on Mac/iPhone but that's what MoltenVK is meant to fill in.
It might be a good choice like 10 years from now but it's difficult to reach the same level of driver quality on Windows as Direct3D has.
- Michael
From: Frenchy Pilou (PILOU)
Thanks for the precisions!
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