[HN Gopher] An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers
___________________________________________________________________
An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers
Author : MrBuddyCasino
Score : 573 points
Date : 2024-10-31 20:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| renewiltord wrote:
| The work by Alyssa R and Asahi Lina is great stuff. I have to say
| that a lot of this is really inscrutable unless you're used to
| driver code. I wish it were much easier to write this stuff but
| hardware stuff is so idiosyncratic.
|
| Have to say I do enjoy all the old school style whimsy with the
| witch costume and whatnot.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what they do is just this side of magic, so maybe it's not
| really a costume?
| amelius wrote:
| Any sufficiently closed technology is indistinguishable from
| magic.
|
| In fact, the company is so closed that Rosenzweig is the one
| we should consult when we encounter aliens.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't think the work they do is what one could call
| closed though is it?
| hi_hi wrote:
| I've just been watching her recent talk. I noticed she appears
| to change slides with a wave of her wand. Is there an known
| piece of hardware one can purchase to do this?
|
| I tried googling, but trying to find the specific result I'm
| interested in amongst all the blog spam garbage related to
| powerpoint is beyond me. Even googles own AI couldn't help. Sad
| times!
| sen wrote:
| She might be doing some OpenCV/MedaPipe gesture tracking?
| There's lots of tutorials out there and it's not super
| difficult to get some basic gesture tracking going on your
| laptop.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Purchasing one has been illegal since 1863, but the
| technology typically used is a human assistant, although the
| signal is usually more subtle.
| hi_hi wrote:
| Who can forget 1863. The year BigMagic ruined the fun for
| everyone.
| zaptrem wrote:
| While I originally understood it the way you did, I think
| they were referring to this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
| sroussey wrote:
| Ug... a person is watching and clicking for her when she does
| that?
| Onavo wrote:
| Is Leap Motion still a thing?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Maybe some ESP32 or other MCU and accelerometer ? That should
| comfortably fit into a magic wand.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| In this case there's probably a human doing the slides, but
| smart watches have apps that can control slideshows in a
| variety of ways. There's at least one WearOS app (WowMouse)
| that does some gesture based presentation control.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Will M3/M4 need completely different drivers?
| wmf wrote:
| Probably. Apple made major changes to the GPU in M3.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| What were the major differences?
| coldtea wrote:
| Major base changes, or just added more stuff on top of the
| same base?
| wtallis wrote:
| https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/apple-dynamic-caching-
| on-... Changing the register file into a cache sounds like
| a major base change. Raytracing is a major feature added on
| top of existing functionality. So I'd say the answer is:
| plenty of both.
| ferbivore wrote:
| M3 has mesh shader support. The geometry pipeline they
| inherited from PowerVR fundamentally doesn't support them,
| for reasons that go way over my head. They probably changed
| a good chunk of it.
| olliej wrote:
| > for reasons that go way over my head
|
| In fairness to you I think a lot of the stuff involving
| hardware goes over everyone's heads :D
|
| I've seen comments in a number of articles (and I think a
| few comments in this thread) saying that there are a few
| features in Vulcan/opengl/direct3d that were standardized
| ("standardized" in the D3D case?)/required that turned
| out to be really expensive to implement, hard to
| implement fast in hardware anyway, and not necessarily
| actually useful in practice. I think geometry shaders may
| have been one of those cases but I can't recall for sure.
| ferbivore wrote:
| Mesh shaders are actually useful. Or at least game engine
| people love them, which was not the case for geometry
| shaders or even tessellation really. They are _extremely_
| painful to add support for though. Aside from Apple I don
| 't think any mobile IHVs have a working implementation.
| sroussey wrote:
| How it handles memory and registers is quite different.
| TylerE wrote:
| How much will this matter to (somewhat graphics
| demanding) end users? I'm somewhat eagerly awaiting
| swapping out my M1 Studio with the M4 Studio that is all
| but confirmed to be coming at some point next year...
| More GPU grunt would certainly make me happy. Even the M1
| is a far more competent gaming machine than I expected
| but I came from an i9/3080 machine so, well, more is
| more, as long as they can keep it near silent and
| relatively cool running.
| sroussey wrote:
| The GPU speed, like the number of GPU cores, hasn't moved
| a lot. Clock speed has moved up a bit.
| hi_hi wrote:
| I think the answer is yes. I'm making assumptions based on this
| part of Alyssas talk a couple of weeks ago where she talks
| about M3 having specific driver support for raytracing which
| doesn't exist in previous versions.
|
| https://youtu.be/pDsksRBLXPk?t=2895
|
| The whole thing is worth watching to be honest, it's a
| privilege to watch someone share their deep knowledge and
| talent in such an engaging and approachable way.
| olliej wrote:
| ooh, I missed this, thanks for the link!
| hellavapid wrote:
| 'twould be very apple
| scottlamb wrote:
| > tessellator.cl is the most unhinged file of my career
|
| ...so far. The presenter is only 23 apparently. Maybe I'm
| speaking only for myself here, but I think career unhingedness
| does not go down over time as much as one might hope.
|
| In all seriousness, she does really impressive work, so when she
| says this 2,000 lines of C++ is inscrutable, that gives one
| pause. Glad it's working nonetheless.
| dividuum wrote:
| I guess it's these two files?
|
| The original 2600+ lines of C++:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/asahi/mesa/-/blob/main/src/ga...
|
| The translated code:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/asahi/mesa/-/blob/main/src/as...
| whatever1 wrote:
| She is not doing CI/CD so the PMs would fire her in any
| modern company. "Where are the unit tests?!? How is it
| possible to write code without tests and 100% coverage!"
| wmf wrote:
| OpenGL and Vulkan have tons of tests and Alyssa runs them.
| I don't know if it's automated through CI.
| manmal wrote:
| Reportedly, the lack of M3 support so far is because
| there is no M3 Mac Mini which they can use for CI.
| fl0id wrote:
| That was one reason to delay it, but another more
| important they said was to implement gpu things like this
| and other missing features.
| spockz wrote:
| I'm sure if that is the issue we can together find a way
| to sponsor a MacBook with an M3? Or does it specifically
| have to be a Mac mini?
| manmal wrote:
| I can only guess, but it might be a requirement to have
| the machine hosted by a cloud platform.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Is there a blog post about what specifically she found to be
| inscrutable? The C++ doesn't look all that terse at a
| syntactic level, and has plenty of comments. Are the problems
| at the domain level?
| raggi wrote:
| the original had more microsoft smells
| https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-
| Specs/d3d/archive/images...
| samus wrote:
| I can imagine she was glad it took only some gentle
| massaging to make it work. If she had encountered road
| blocks there, she would have had to dig in for real.
|
| The code is quite low on comments and doesn't really
| explain the math there. It probably makes sense if you have
| background in the lofty math side of computer graphics, but
| that's a slightly different skillset than being able to
| reverse-engineer and bring up exotic hardware.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly it doesn't look too bad
|
| A lot of the size is just because the code deals with a lot
| of 3/4 dim stuff and also some things are a bit more verbose
| in code but translate to something short in assembly
| nwallin wrote:
| It's unfathomable that she's 23 and wrote an open source
| graphics driver for a closed-source graphics card. At least
| Einstein had the decency to wait until he was 26 to invent
| special relativity.
| TheCycoONE wrote:
| Multiple, before this she wrote panfrost for ARM mali GPUs
| starting in 2018.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I didn't even know this until now. I looked at her resume and I
| can't grasp how she's been doing an undergraduate degree from
| 2019-2023, meaning that writing an entire GPU driver is the
| side project she made during her degree.
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| For gifted people undergraduate degrees are easy (unless you
| want to go through it really fast). Some people I know barely
| studied for their exams and spent all their time in research
| projects / their own thing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's a lot of free time when you're in college.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| So much this. I wish I had a fraction of the free time I
| had when I was doing my degrees...
| jjmarr wrote:
| Depends on major. I'm in engineering so it's more work than
| a full time job for whatever reason.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >The presenter is only 23 apparently
|
| Yes, well, from the article:
|
| >That works, but ""tessellator.cl is the most unhinged file of
| my career""; doing things that way was also the most unhinged
| thing she has done in her career ""and I'm standing up here in
| a witch hat for the fifth year in a row"". The character
| debuted in the exact same room in 2019 when she was 17 years
| old, she recalled.
|
| 17. That's impressive.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing
| them considered unethical?
| anamexis wrote:
| From the LWN FAQ:
|
| > Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
|
| > Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing
| lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people
| do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to
| gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
| vintagedave wrote:
| It says,
|
| > The following subscription-only content has been made
| available to you by an LWN subscriber.
|
| I might be wrong but I read that as there being funding to make
| the previously paywalled content available, probably on an
| article-specific basis. Does anyone know?
| anamexis wrote:
| Also from the LWN FAQ:
|
| > What are subscriber links
|
| > A subscriber link is a mechanism by which LWN subscribers
| may grant free access to specific LWN articles to others. It
| takes the form of a special link which bypasses the
| subscription gate for that article.
| cbhl wrote:
| The purpose of these links is to be shared, see the FAQ:
| https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks
|
| The LWN paywall is unique in that all the content becomes
| freely available after a week. The subscriber links are there
| to encourage you to subscribe if you are in a position to do
| so.
| sophacles wrote:
| Representatives of LWN have posted here before saying they are
| OK with it, along with a polite request not to have it go
| overboard since they need to fund the site and writers,
| editors, etc. That funding comes from subscriptions only IIUC.
|
| FWIW an LWN subscription is pretty affordable and supports some
| of the best in-depth technical reporting about Linux and linux-
| related topics available.
|
| (I am not affiliated with LWN, just a happy subscriber - I also
| credit some of my career success to the knowledge I've gained
| by reading their articles).
| ewoodrich wrote:
| A couple times now I've remembered to refill my subscription
| after my old one ran out of months thanks to an LWN free
| article being posted to HN.
|
| So n=1 it's an effective advertising tactic even though I can
| read the specific article for free.
| awsrhawrhawrh wrote:
| Funding also comes from sponsors, as the article obviously
| states:
|
| "I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux
| Foundation, for travel assistance to Montreal for XDC."
| flykespice wrote:
| It's not different from shared articles here from subscriber-
| only newsletters being accompanied by the archived link in the
| topmost comment.
|
| Users here seem to not care about those "ethics"
| wtallis wrote:
| There's nothing ethically wrong about sharing LWN subscriber
| links on HN when the LWN editor has repeatedly posted on HN
| that doing so is fine.
| rstat1 wrote:
| There's a difference between posting a sub-only link to
| that's intended to be shared in moderation, and posting a
| link to pay walled article as if to expect the clicker of
| that link to pay for a sub to that website just so they can
| read that article.
|
| Its a pretty absurd expectation.
| samus wrote:
| It's really not such a big deal since everything on LWN
| becomes public after some weeks. Rather the opposite, it
| ensures that the site remains well-known.
| zarzavat wrote:
| I'm sure that they are very, very happy that HN is directing a
| firehose of traffic at their site on the regular.
|
| In order to subscribe people need to know that LWN exists.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I know this is off on a tangent, but I recently signed up for
| LWN and it's well worth the price. The articles and news
| items alone are worth it, but the archive is just amazing.
| pimeys wrote:
| Same here. I originally found LWN through a HN post. I've
| been a subscriber for a few years now, and I'm reading
| almost everything they publish, even if I'm not always
| understanding everything they talk about. The quality of
| writing is very high.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware
| and how much is emulated?
| jsheard wrote:
| The things being emulated are mostly legacy features that are
| barely used in modern software, if at all, so the overhead of
| emulating them for backward compatibility isn't the end of the
| world. I can't blame Apple for not supporting geometry shaders
| in hardware, when they're widely considered to be a mistake
| that never should have been standardized in the first place,
| and Metal never supported them at all so they could only ever
| come up in old OpenGL code on macOS.
|
| https://x.com/pointinpolygon/status/1270695113967181827
| parl_match wrote:
| I wouldn't go so far as to say "mistake that should never
| have been standardized". Their intended use was always pretty
| limited, though. There's zero reason for anything built in
| recent memory to use them.
| jsheard wrote:
| They had limited uses _and_ turned out to be incredibly
| hard to implement efficiently in hardware, so in practice
| it was nearly always faster to just keep using the proven
| techniques that GS was supposed to replace.
|
| http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=667
| RantyDave wrote:
| So _why_ does instancing suck? I would have thought it
| would be heavily optimised in the driver...
| p_l wrote:
| It seems Device Generated Commands might be better case
| for instancing these days?
| comex wrote:
| And yet one of the fancy new features being advertised in
| recent years (in multiple APIs including Metal) is
| support for mesh shaders - which seem to have a lot in
| common with geometry shaders, including the output
| ordering property that that post blames for geometry
| shaders' bad performance. I'm not a graphics programmer
| myself, but this makes me suspect there's more to the
| story.
| dgfitz wrote:
| If you're not a graphics programmer, how did you learn of
| this? I'd love to read about it.
| HeuristicsCG wrote:
| if your hardware supports mesh shaders properly, it won't
| be very hard for it to also support these other features
| emulated in software (geometry shaders, tessellation,
| lines etc).
|
| But mesh shaders are fairly new, will take a few years
| for the hardware and software to adapt.
| adrian_b wrote:
| They are fairly new at the other GPU makers, but the
| NVIDIA GPUs have them starting with Turing, 6 years ago.
|
| AMD GPUs have them starting with RDNA 2.
| winterismute wrote:
| I am not an expert on geometry processing pipelines,
| however Mesh Shaders are specced differently from GS,
| essentially one of the big problems with GS is that it's
| basically impossible for the HW, even after all the
| render state is set and a shader is bound and compiled
| (and "searched"), to understand how much memory and
| compute the execution will take, which breaks a lot of
| the assumptions that allow SIMD machines to work well. In
| fact, the main advertised feature of GS was to create
| geometry out of nothing (unbounded particle effects),
| while the main advertised feature of Mesh Shaders is GPU-
| driven and efficient culling of geometry (see for example
| the recent mesh shader pipeline talk from Remedy on Alan
| Wake 2). It is true that Mesh Shaders are designed also
| for amplification, and that word has been chosen
| specifically to hint that you will be able to "multiply"
| your primitives but not generating random sequences out
| of thin air.
|
| It is also true however that advances in APIs and HW
| desgins allowed for some parts that were troublesome at
| the time of GS not to be so troublesome anymore.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Tessellation does not seem to fit this description though
| dtquad wrote:
| The graphics pipeline in modern GPUs are mostly a thin low-
| level Vulkan/Metal-like layer on top of a massively parallel
| CUDA-like compute architecture.
|
| It's basically all emulated. One of the reasons GPU
| manufacturers are unwilling to open source their drivers is
| because a lot of their secret sauce actually happens in
| software in the drivers on top of the massively parallel CUDA-
| like compute architecture.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| I didn't read the article and don't know about Apple but
| that's definitely not true for everyone. Source: see amdgpu
| built on top of HSA.
|
| EDIT: to be precise yes ofc every chip is a massively
| parallel array of compute units but CUDA has absolutely
| nothing to do with it and no not every company buries the
| functionality in the driver.
| david-gpu wrote:
| As a former insider, this is NOT remotely how I would
| describe reality.
|
| I have signed NDAs and don't feel comfortable going into any
| detail, other than saying that there is a TON going on inside
| GPUs that is not "basically all emulated".
| user_7832 wrote:
| Maybe a tall ask, but have you considered writing down all
| your experiences into a book, and release it after all NDAs
| expire? I'd love to read more about low level hardware and
| the behind the scenes stuff involved. I'm sure you've got a
| lot of good stories.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > I'd love to read more about low level hardware and the
| behind the scenes stuff involved. I'm sure you've got a
| lot of good stories.
|
| I don't know why you think there's anything resembling
| "good stories" (I don't even know what would constitute a
| good story - swash buckling adventures?). It's just
| grimy-ass runtime/driver/firmware code interfacing with
| hardware features/flaws.
| snewman wrote:
| NDAs don't generally have an expiration date. (As opposed
| to non-competes and non-solicitation agreements, which
| generally do.) An NDA typically ends only if the
| information in question becomes public, and then only for
| that particular information.
| exDM69 wrote:
| This statement isn't true at all. There are tons of fixed
| function hardware units for graphics in GPUs in addition to
| compute cores: triangle rasterizers, texture units,
| raytracing units, blitters, copy engines, video codecs, etc.
| They interact with the shader/compute cores and it's getting
| more common that the shader core is driving the rasterizer
| etc than vice versa (mesh shaders and ray tracing for
| example).
|
| Calling it "all emulated" is very very far from the truth.
|
| You can independently verify this by digging into open source
| graphics drivers.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| How is verifying against a worse performing, open source
| GPU driver any sort of verification that proprietary
| drivers do not do special things you wouldn't expect?
| samus wrote:
| A lot of it is software, but not necessarily in the driver.
| Nouveau folks pretty much gave up and use NVidia's firmware
| blob going forward. While that's mostly due to NVidia not
| cooperating in making crucial capabilities of the GPU
| available to non-signed firmware blobs, the upside is that it
| will hopefully significantly reduce the effort connected with
| wiring up new hardware components on the GPU.
| gigatexal wrote:
| You know it's not like Apple has a lot to lose in terms of
| market share if they opened even the specs of their hardware
| up to make folks like the Asahi team's lives' easier. What
| does Apple have in terms of the desktop market? 5%?
|
| If anything working, fully baked desktop Linux working on ARM
| Mac hardware would drive sales and Apple would still get the
| profits. Besides their services are still mostly available
| too. Tux loving folks can subscribe to AppleTV, and music
| etc.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Is this really so different from any other mobile derived GPU?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Idk, TIL, had a career in mobile for 15 years running and I
| didn't know this was a distinctive quality of mobile GPUs.
| (makes sense! but all that to say, I'm very interested to
| hear more, and I'll trade you an answer to that question:
| "maybe not! sounds like you got some smart stuff to share
| :)")
| ferbivore wrote:
| Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to
| decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area
| or engineering effort to support. Other IHVs don't get that
| choice; for geometry shaders, for instance, they're part of
| both Vulkan and OpenGLES, there are games and benchmarks that
| use them, and customers (end-users, gamedevs,
| review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs
| based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader
| support is. Same story for tessellation, transform feedback,
| and whatever else Apple dropped.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| I don't think it's accurate to say Apple "dropped" these
| features. Tessellation is done with general purpose compute
| shaders. You can do the same with "geometry shaders" if the
| need arises as well
| dagmx wrote:
| Other hardware vendors absolutely do the same. Geometry
| shaders are poor performers on several other vendors for
| precisely the same reason
| ferbivore wrote:
| At least some Qualcomm, Imagination and Broadcom GPUs
| support geometry shaders in hardware. Not entirely sure
| about Arm. To be fair, it could be the support isn't very
| good.
| dagmx wrote:
| Some do, but a lot will have their firmware actually do
| the translation into other compute types that align
| better with the hardware.
| rstat1 wrote:
| >>(end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC
| vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on
| how good their geometry shader support is
|
| Do they? I can't remember ever seeing any mention of
| Geometry Shader performance in a GPU review I've
| read/watched. The one thing I've ever heard about it was
| about how bad they were.
| lewispollard wrote:
| Yeah, geometry shaders aren't even widely used, they
| weren't great in the first place and devs have moved on.
| egwor wrote:
| Really impressive. Well done (and thanks for the laughs. Starting
| in French would be so funny)
| recvonline wrote:
| Any link to the fact that the drivers are written in Rust?
| hoherd wrote:
| https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/
|
| > Since this was going to be the first Linux Rust GPU kernel
| driver, I had a lot of work ahead! Not only did I have to write
| the driver itself, but I also had to write the Rust
| abstractions for the Linux DRM graphics subsystem. While Rust
| can directly call into C functions, doing that doesn't have any
| of Rust's safety guarantees. So in order to use C code safely
| from Rust, first you have to write wrappers that give you a
| safe Rust-like API. I ended up writing almost 1500 lines of
| code just for the abstractions, and coming up with a good and
| safe design took a lot of thinking and rewriting!
|
| Also
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/de1c5a8be/drivers/g...
| where "drm" is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
| karunamurti wrote:
| I particularly like line 1322 and 1344
| computersuck wrote:
| That's not even a costume because she's definitely a wizard
| indrora wrote:
| (:
| adastra22 wrote:
| > frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature
|
| That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray
| tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading
| video cards to get working on games they play.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The same was true about 3D TVs. Also a gimmick.
| talldayo wrote:
| 3D TVs failed before they existed as a product category. You
| cannot encode enough information through stereoscopy to
| create a convincing or "realistic" 3D effect. The conditions
| for making it work have _always_ been fickle and as 6DOF VR
| /AR is proving, it was never enough to be convincing anyways.
| Encoding two slightly different versions of a video and
| layering them on top of each other is a dirty hack. It is not
| a holistic solution to a problem they seriously intended to
| solve in the first place. It is a novelty designed from the
| bottom-up as a scarcely-usable toy.
|
| Ray tracing is, by comparison, the holy grail of all realtime
| lighting effects. Global illumination makes the current
| raster lighting techniques look primitive by comparison. It
| is not an exaggeration to say that realtime graphics research
| largely revolves around using hacks to imitate a fraction of
| ray tracing's power. They are piling on pipeline-after-
| pipeline for ambient occlusion, realtime reflections and
| shadowing, bloom and glare as well as god rays and
| screenspace/volumetric effects. These are all things you
| don't have to hack together when your scene is already path
| tracing the environment with the physical properties
| accounted for. Instead of stacking hacks, you have a coherent
| pipeline that can be denoised, antialiased, upscaled and
| post-processed in one pass. No shadowmaps, no baked lighting,
| all realtime.
|
| There is a reason why _even Apple_ quit dragging their feet
| here - modern real-time graphics _are_ the gimmick, ray
| tracing is the production-quality alternative.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Thank you. This guy gets it.
|
| Path tracing is _the_ gold standard for computer graphics.
| It is a physically based rendering model that is based on
| how lighting actually works. There are degrees of path
| tracing of varying quality, but there is nothing else that
| is better from a visual quality and accuracy standpoint.
|
| Your modern AAA title does a massive amount of impressive
| hacks to get rasterization into the uncanny valley, as
| rasterization has nothing to do with how photons work. That
| can all be thrown out and replaced with "model photons
| interacting with the scene" if the path tracing hardware
| was powerful enough. It'd be simpler and perfectly
| accurate. The end result would not live in the uncanny
| valley, but would be indistinguishable from reality.
|
| Assuming the hardware was fast enough. But we'll get there.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| This is all built on the, frankly, nonsensical assumption
| that photorealism is _the_ , let alone _a_ , primary
| goal.
| adastra22 wrote:
| In most cases of high end / AAA game titles, it is. Not
| all, but certainly most.
| talldayo wrote:
| Not really. _Tiny Glade_ is a recent ray-traced title
| that has no goal of photorealism whatsoever, and it looks
| gorgeous with RT lighting and shadows:
| https://youtu.be/QAUSBxxgIbQ
|
| You can scale these same principles to even _less_
| photorealistic games like the _Borderlands_ series or a
| _Grand Theft Auto_ game. Ray tracing is less about
| photorealism (although it is a potent side effect) and
| more about creating dynamic lighting conditions for an
| interactive scene. By simulating the behavior of light,
| you get realistic lighting - photoreal or not a lot of
| games rely on SSR and shadowmaps that can be replaced
| with realtime RT.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| The question isn't " _can_ you achieve your look with RT?
| " but "do you _need_ RT to achieve your look? ".
|
| As long as traditional lighting _is enough_ (and given
| that it _has_ for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a
| gimmick.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Think of the 'impressive hacks' used in realtime 3D
| rendering as compression techniques to reduce bandwidth
| (and this goes all the way back to 8-bit home computers
| with their tricky video memory encoding, this was
| essentially hardware image compression to reduce memory
| bandwidth).
|
| Why waste computing power on 'physically correct'
| algorithms, when the 'cheap hacks' can do so much more in
| less time, while producing nearly the same result.
| talldayo wrote:
| Because a lot of the "cheap hacks" aren't even cheap.
| Famously, using real-time SSR to simulate ray-traced
| reflections can end up _slower_ than ray tracing them
| from the jump, the same goes for high-res shadowmaps.
| Ambient occlusion is a lighting pass you can skip
| entirely if you render shadows the right way with RT from
| the start. If you keep stacking these hacks until you
| have every feature that a RT scene does, you 're probably
| taking longer to render each frame than a globally
| illuminated scene would.
|
| Accelerating ray tracing in-hardware is a literal no-
| brainer unless you deliberately want to ostracize game
| developers and animators on Mac. I understand the
| reactionary "But I don't _care_ about dynamic shadows! "
| opinion, but there's practically no opportunity cost
| here. If you _want_ to use traditional lighting
| techniques, you can still render it on an RT-enabled GPU.
| You just also have the option of not wanting to pull out
| your fingernails when rendering a preview in Blender.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yes, for some specific problems, raytracing definitely
| makes a lot of sense, but rasterization and 'geometry
| compression' via triangles also makes a lot of sense for
| other situations. I think the best approach will always
| be a hybrid approach instead of a 100% pure raytracing
| pipeline.
|
| The other question is how much of the raytracing features
| in 3D APIs need to be implemented in fixed-function
| hardware units, or whether this is just another area
| where the pendulum will swing back and forth between
| hardware and software (running on the GPU of course).
|
| But then maybe in 10 years we'll have 'signed distance
| field units' in GPUs and nobody talks about raytracing
| anymore ;)
| talldayo wrote:
| From everything I've seen, hardware acceleration seems to
| be the only option. Software-accelerated RT existed for
| years and was mainly the reason why it was disregarded as
| a technique in the first place. Here's the OG M1 Pro,
| manufactured on TSMC 5nm, getting blown the fuck out by a
| 3070 Ti on Samsung 8nm: https://youtu.be/NgDTCNPm0vo
|
| The architecture will probably improve on both Nvidia and
| Apple's side going forward, but in theory both GPUs
| should be easier to support for longer since they're not
| focused on accelerating obsolete junk like MSAA or HBAO.
| It enables a better convergence of features, it makes
| porting to-and-from Mac easier, and with any luck Apple
| might even quit being so sheepish about working with
| Khronos since they're not actively neglecting the Vulkan
| featureset anymore.
| MBCook wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily mean it's important, just that it's
| the only thing they can think of to sell. Much like some AI
| stuff we're seeing right now.
|
| Personally I think it's useful for a few things, but it's not
| the giant game changer I think they want you to think it is.
|
| Raytraced reflections are a very nice improvement. Using it for
| global illumination and shadows is also a very good
| improvement.
|
| But it's not exactly what the move to multi texturing was, or
| the first GPUs. Or shaders.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some
| games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and
| the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't
| worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the
| ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement.
|
| So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many
| of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's also a pretty large performance hit, even when the
| quality improvement is subtle. A major and unfortunate
| consequence is that it has driven even more games to rely on
| upscaling and heavy post-processing, all of which tend to
| blur the output image and introduce artifacts and add
| latency.
| jms55 wrote:
| You're looking at years of careful artist and engineer work
| to get something that looks almost as good as pathtraced
| visuals. The fact that it's so good without any raytracing is
| a credit to the developers.
|
| Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one
| unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and
| allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously
| possible. So yeah some current games don't look much better
| with RT, but the gameplay and art direction was designed
| without raytracing in mind in the first place, and had a
| _lot_ of work put into it to get those results.
|
| Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable
| currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is
| amazing! And with another 3-5 years of algorithm development
| and hardware speedups, and developers and artists getting
| familiar with raytracing, we might start seeing games require
| raytracing.
|
| Games typically take 4+ years to develop, so anything you're
| seeing coming out now was probably started when the best GPU
| you could buy for raytracing was an RTX 2080 TI.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable
| currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is
| amazing!
|
| Aside from Cyberpunk 2077 and a handful of ancient games
| with NVIDIA-sponsored remakes, what even offers fully path
| traced lighting as an option? The way it went for CP2077
| makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an
| exaggeration: performance is only good if you have a
| current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k, the path
| tracing option didn't get added until years after the game
| originally shipped, and they had to fix a bunch of glitches
| resulting from the game world being built without path
| tracing in mind. We're clearly still _years_ away from path
| tracing being broadly available among AAA games, let alone
| playable on any large portion of gaming PCs.
|
| For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look
| good without fully path traced lighting.
| talldayo wrote:
| > For the foreseeable future, games will still need to
| look good without fully path traced lighting.
|
| And in 7-10 years when the software stack is matured,
| we'll be thanking ourselves for doing this in hardware
| the right way. I don't understand why planning for the
| future is considered so wasteful - this is an
| architecture Apple can re-use for future hardware and
| scale to larger GPUs. Maybe it _doesn 't_ make sense for
| Macs today, but in 5 years that may no longer be the
| case. Now people don't have to throw away a perfectly
| good computer made in these twilight years of Moore's
| law.
|
| For non-games applications like Blender or Cinema4D,
| having hardware-accelerated ray tracing and denoising is
| _already_ a game-changer. Instead of switching between
| preview and render layers, you can interact with a
| production-quality render in real time. Materials are
| properly emissive and transmissive, PBR and normal maps
| composite naturally instead of needing different
| settings, and you can count the time it takes before
| getting an acceptable frame in milliseconds, not minutes.
|
| I don't often give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but
| hardware-accelerated ray tracing is a no-brainer here. If
| they aren't going to abandon Metal, and they intend to
| maintain their minuscule foothold in PC gaming, they have
| to lay the groundwork for future titles to get developed
| on. They have the hardware investment, they have the
| capital to invest in their software, and their
| competitors like Khronos (apparently) and Microsoft both
| had ray tracing APIs for years when Apple finally
| released theirs.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I think you have the wrong impression. Apple M2 does not
| have hw ray tracing. M3 and M4 do.
| porphyra wrote:
| UE5 supports fully path traced lighting and Black Myth
| Wukong is a recent example.
| jms55 wrote:
| > performance is only good if you have a current-
| generation GPU that cost at least $1k
|
| That's why I said games aren't currently designed with
| only pathtracing in mind, but in 3-5 years with faster
| hardware and better algorithms, we'll probably start to
| see it be more widespread. That's typically how graphics
| usually develop; something that's only for high end GPUs
| eventually becomes accessible to everyone. SSAO used to
| be considered extremely demanding, and now it's
| accessible to even the weakest phone GPU with good enough
| quality.
|
| Again the fact that it's feasible at all, even if it
| requires a $1000 GPU, is amazing! 5 years ago real time
| path tracing would've been seen as impossible.
|
| > The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable"
| claim seem like quite an exaggeration
|
| Based on the raw frame timing numbers and temporal
| stability, I don't think it is. RT GI is currently
| usually around ~4ms, which is at the upper edge of
| usable. However the temporal stability is usually the
| bigger issue - at current ray counts, with current
| algorithms, either noise or slow response times is an
| inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with another
| few years of improvements, we'll probably get to the
| point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the current
| stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which would be
| perfectly usable.
| wtallis wrote:
| > RT GI is currently usually around ~4ms, which is at the
| upper edge of usable. However the temporal stability is
| usually the bigger issue - at current ray counts, with
| current algorithms, either noise or slow response times
| is an inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with
| another few years of improvements, we'll probably get to
| the point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the
| current stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which
| would be perfectly usable.
|
| Maybe you should be saying 70% _feasible_ rather than 70%
| _usable_. And you seem to be _very_ optimistic about what
| kind of improvements we can expect for affordable, low-
| power GPU hardware over a mere 3-5 years. I don 't think
| algorithmic improvements to denoisers and upscalers can
| get us much further unless we're using very wrong image
| quality metrics to give their blurriness a passing grade.
| Two rays per pixel is simply never going to suffice.
|
| Right now, an RTX 4090 ($1700+) runs at less than 50 fps
| at 2560x1440, unless you lie to yourself about resolution
| using an upscaler. So the best consumer GPU at the moment
| is about 70-80% of what's necessary to use path tracing
| and hit resolution and refresh rate targets typical of
| high-end gaming _in 2012_.
|
| Having better-than-4090 performance trickle down to a
| more mainstream price point of $300-400 is going to take
| _at least_ two more generations of GPU hardware
| improvements even with the most optimistic expectations
| for Moore 's Law, and that's the minimum necessary to do
| path tracing _well_ at a modest resolution on a game that
| will be approaching a decade old by then. It 'll take
| another hardware generation for that level of performance
| to fit in the price and power budgets of consoles and
| laptops.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Alan Wake 2 has had path tracing from day 1, and it looks
| excellent with (and without) it.
| porphyra wrote:
| Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an
| unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection
| quality is extremely stark and noticeable. Anecdotally, when
| I was playing Black Myth Wukong recently, there were some
| shiny environments where full path tracing really made a huge
| difference.
|
| So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games
| properly take advantage of this currently, rather than the
| effect not being good enough.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8
| adastra22 wrote:
| Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has
| been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable
| positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect
| example.
|
| Unfortunately most people's experience with raytracing is
| turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but
| it was added through a patch, which results in _worse_
| lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-
| in global illumination using more light sources than
| whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was
| World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a
| couple years back.
|
| WoW Burning Crusade launched in * _2006*_ originally. The
| "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine
| but with the original game art assets and content.
|
| Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably!
| In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate.
|
| Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that
| was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game
| looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved
| anything
| adastra22 wrote:
| What's perhaps not obvious is that if you take a 2006
| game and "add" raytracing, _there 's no relevant
| information available for the raytracer_. Whatever
| original light sources were used to bake in global
| illumination does not exist in the game assets used for
| rasterization. In the best case the original art assets
| can be used to create raytracing scenes, but it's not as
| straightforward as it might seem, and most conversions
| are pretty sloppy.
|
| If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look
| at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for
| raytracing from the ground-up.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The M1-M4 GPUs are also nowhere close to fast enough for it to
| be useful. Just like Snapdragon having ray tracing support is
| ridiculous.
| musictubes wrote:
| Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray
| tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non
| graphics use?
| boulos wrote:
| You'll have to see what the instruction set / features are
| capable of, but most likely the "hardware ray tracing"
| support means it can do ray-BVH and ray-triangle intersection
| in hardware. You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle
| intersection for collision detection.
|
| The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are
| usually just done on the general compute.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for
| collision detection.
|
| The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in
| general is that it's too high latency to incorporate
| effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for
| things that don't impact the world, like particle
| simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything
| interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and
| also the GPU is usually the visual bottleneck anyway so
| having it spend power on stuff the half-idle CPU could do
| adequately isn't a good use of resources.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It should be useful for anything that involves stabbing
| checks on large triangle soups. Whether it's worth "wasting"
| die space for this is debatable of course.
| exDM69 wrote:
| > Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any
| non graphics use?
|
| It's not "just math", it's data structures and algorithms for
| tree traversal, with a focus on memory cache hardware
| friendliness.
|
| The math part is trivial. It's the memory part that's hard.
|
| Ray tracing hardware and acceleration structures are highly
| specific to ray tracing and not really usable for other kinds
| of spatial queries. That said, ray tracing has applications
| outside of computer graphics. Medical imaging for example.
| zamadatix wrote:
| While it may eventually be a non-gimmick in the industry as the
| compute needed for it advances more it's always going to be
| quite the gimmick in terms of what the M1/M2 GPU can do with
| it.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Wow! if the industry is pushing it must be good right? Just
| like the megapixels wars for cameras.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| ...and yet the most popular use case for raytracing seems to be
| more correct reflections in puddles ;)
| ZiiS wrote:
| Not sure if I can process "incredibly arrogant" in relation to
| the Herculean work and insight demonstrated.
|
| However, it is important to put things in context. Something
| can be a 'Gimmick' on several year old integrated mobile
| hardware that can't run most games at a reasonable FPS without
| it; and not a 'Gimmick' on cutting edge space heaters.
| pxc wrote:
| > it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards
| to get working on games they play.
|
| Ray tracing is also extremely heavily marketed, and at a time
| when GPU upgrades have become infrequent for most people due to
| extremely high prices and relatively weak overall performance
| gains year over year.
|
| The industry is adopting ray tracing because they need to be
| able to offer _something_ new when the overall performance
| gains generation over generation have been slowing for years.
| They 've been leveraging marketing hard to try to generate
| demand for upgrades among gamers, knowing cryptocurrency won't
| buoy them forever.
|
| That ray tracing is cited as a reason among gamers who do
| upgrade their GPUs is unsurprising and not really a strong
| indicator that ray tracing is a great feature.
|
| At any rate, both the gaming industry and the wider tech
| industry are known to be extremely faddish at times. So is
| consumer behavior. Things 'the whole industry is doing' has
| always been a category that includes many gimmicks.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| It is marketing bs, it was not needed and is not needed imo,
| and many other people's opinions. Expressing opinion can't be
| arrogant imho
| olliej wrote:
| Alyssa is amazing, I remember the first article about the GPU
| work, and then learning she was only 17 and _poof_ mind blown.
|
| It's truly stunning that anyone could do what she did, let alone
| a teenager (yes I know, she's not a teenager anymore, passage of
| time, etc :D)
| gcr wrote:
| I've been trained to expect articles with this headline to say
| something like "we're dropping support and are getting acqui-
| hired."
| m463 wrote:
| _" our target hardware is running literally none of those
| things". What is needed is to somehow translate DirectX to
| Vulkan, Windows to Linux, x86 to Arm64, and 4KB pages to 16KB
| pages._
|
| oh my.
| kristianp wrote:
| I was going going to say she should work for Valve to help get
| Steam working on Linux on Macs, but it seems she already does?
| [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Nice; that raises some interesting questions as to what Valve
| is planning here. Steam/Proton on macs would make a lot of
| sense for them hard as it may be. People booting linux on their
| macs to play games would really annoy Apple probably.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Steam/Proton on macs would make a lot of sense ..... would
| really annoy Apple probably
|
| Sounds like a win-win situation.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| There was a Proton for ARM test build [1] that got talked
| about recently, your guess is entirely possible.
|
| [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/steam-
| lik...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > People booting linux on their macs to play games would
| really annoy Apple probably.
|
| You dont have to boot Linux to play PC games on Mac.
|
| Apple already provides the tools you need to build a Mac
| native equivalent to Proton.
|
| There are several options built using those tools, both paid
| {Crossover) and free/open source (Whisky).
|
| Whisky combines the same ooen source Wine project that Proton
| leverages with Apple's Rosetta x86 emulation and Apple's
| DirectX emulation layer (part of the Game Porting Toolkit)
| into a single easy to use tool.
|
| https://getwhisky.app/
| flyingpenguin wrote:
| The problem here is that apple only provides Metal as the
| graphics driver. This solution instead creates a native
| Vulkan driver which has solutions to hardware<->vulkan
| incompatibilities built in at the driver level.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| MacOS provides Metal as its native Graphics API.
|
| Proton and Alyssa's solution use Vulkan on Linux as their
| native graphics API.
|
| Regardless, you have to provide a translation layer so
| that Windows games written to call DirectX APis use the
| native graphics layer of the platform you are running on.
|
| Unless you happen to be emulating a Windows game written
| to use Vulkan instead of DirectX, Vulkan really doesn't
| matter at all on the Mac.
|
| If you do want to emulate one of the rare Vulkan based
| Windows games on a Mac, the MoltenVK translation layer
| handles that.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| The problem is that Whisky is not for the casual user.
|
| I used it and found it confusing at first. Imagine your
| average gamer, they'd never get past dragging in the app.
| The Steam Deck (and Proton) have been so successful because
| you can just power on the Deck and use it. No tinkering or
| third-party tools to do what you want.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| That's certainly not what the reviews of Whisky had to
| say, although I have seen it said that buying a Crossover
| license gets you more hand holding than a free copy of
| Whisky does.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I have a bet going that their next Steam Deck is going to
| have an ARM processor.
|
| Allegedly NVidia is working on a WoA SoC, now that Qualcomm's
| contract with MS has ended. If NVidia puts their recent
| capital gains into a performant ARM chip like Apple (tapeout
| alone would likely run in the billion-dollar range), we can
| hopefully expect AMD to respond with something soon after.
| Once the chipsets are available, it's a matter of getting
| Linux to work with mixed page-size processes.
|
| I have no idea how possible that is, but if the emulation
| performance is anything like Rosetta and the M1 proved
| possible, most users won't even notice.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| What I really respect is the dedication to completing support for
| the M1/M2. Too many projects get dropped the moment the next
| shiny ray-traced toy comes along.
|
| I know this type of work can be challenging to say the least. My
| own dabble with Zig and Pinephone hardware drivers reminded me of
| some of the pain of poorly documented hardware, but what a reward
| when it works.
|
| My own M1 was only purchased because of this project and Alyssa's
| efforts with OpenGL+ES. It only ever boots Asahi Linux. Thank-you
| very much for your efforts.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was
| how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second,
| how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these
| devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from
| Apple itself and the Linux community.
|
| Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably
| paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's
| going over my head, but she discussed missing features in the
| chip that are being worked around.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Underrated point, maybe it's aluminum unibody or more stable
| OS, but in my experience average MBP lifetime is meaningfully
| higher compared to a windows machine. My longest lasting
| windows machine was T400 Thinkpad which lasted 5 years before
| Core 2 Duo architecture stopped being able to keep up. It got
| replaced with HP Envy with great specs but made out of
| plastic which barely lasted 1.5 years before screen fell off
| (literally). Replaced with 17" 2014 MBP which is still alive
| after SSD replacement.
| throw88888 wrote:
| If you replaced the T400 because it felt slow, maybe it's
| just a software/OS issue.
|
| The hardware on Thinkpad T-models should last longer than
| just 5 years in general.
|
| My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a
| Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still.
|
| I run Linux + OpenBox, so it is a somewhat lightweight
| setup to be fair.
| dm319 wrote:
| My daughter just asked me for the 'tiny' laptop. She has
| taken my Thinkpad X60 which runs linux mint. It's getting
| on for 20 years old soon!
| bhouston wrote:
| > My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with
| a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still.
|
| I am not sure I would be productive with that. Any Core 2
| Duo is 10x slower single core and 20x slower multi-core
| than a current generation laptop CPU at this point.
|
| Eg: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8588187?
| baselin...
|
| I think it would mostly be good as an SSH terminal, but
| doing any real work locally on it seems frankly
| unfeasible.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| The problem is software, though. I have a X200s with 4
| GiB RAM from 2009. It was interesting to see how Firefox
| got slower and slower over the years. Granted, it not
| only is Firefox but also retard websites which use loads
| and loads of JS to display static content in the end. In
| return, it is not like JS didn't exist back then: The
| XhtmlRequest thingy for dynamic website updates or
| whatever the name for that was has been added years prior
| to that.
|
| So, yes, a lot of this comes down to software and a
| massive waste of cycles. I remember one bug in
| Electron/Atom where a blinking cursor caused like 10% CPU
| load or something along that line. They fixed it, but it
| tells you way more about how broken the entire software
| stack was at that time and it didn't get better since
| then.
|
| I mean, think about this: I used 1280x1024 on a 20"
| screen back in the mid 90ies on (Unix!) machines that are
| insanely less powerful than even this X200s. The biggest
| difference: Now you can move windows around visually,
| back then you moved the outer frame of it to the new
| place and then it got redrawn. And the formatting options
| in browsers are better, i.e. it is easier to design the
| layout you want. Plus there is no need for palette
| changes when switching windows anymore ("true color").
| The overall productivity hasn't kept up with the increase
| in computing power, though. Do you think a machine 100x
| the performance will give you 100x the productivity? With
| some exceptions, the weak link in the chain were, are,
| and will always be humans, and if there are delays, we
| are talking almost always about badly "optimized"
| software (aka bloat). That was an issue back then already
| and, unfortunately, it didn't get better.
| throw88888 wrote:
| Horses for courses -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I do development and DevOps on it. Sure there are some
| intense workloads that I probably couldn't run, but it
| works just fine as my daily driver.
|
| I also have a corporate/work laptop from Dell with 32GB
| RAM, 16 cores @ 4.x GHz etc. - a beast - but it runs
| Windows (+ antivirus, group policy crap etc.) and is
| slower in many aspects.
|
| Sure I can compile a single file faster and spin up more
| pods/containers etc. on the Dell laptop, but I am usually
| not constrained on my T420.
|
| I generally don't spend much time waiting for my machine
| to finish things, compared to the time I spend e.g.
| writing text/code/whatever.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| There's also the fact that the quality is all-round higher,
| making them more enjoyable to use. The current HP
| Elitebooks have much crappier screens than my 2013 MBP.
| Touchpads have improved, but they're still leagues behind
| that 11-year-old machine.
|
| I'm usually fairly careful with my things, so my gen8 hp
| elitebook still has all its bits together, but I've never
| really enjoyed using it. The screen, in particular, has
| ridiculous viewing angles, to the point it's impossible to
| not have any color cast on some region.
| ho_schi wrote:
| ThinkPad _X220_ here. From late 2012 until late 2023 in
| service with Linux. It is still usable but finally replaced
| it by an X13 Gen3 AMD with Linux. The magnesium body is a
| bless and feels a lot better to the skin than aluminium.
| The HiDPI display is the biggest upgrade. The six row
| keyboard is sturdy but a downgrade from the seven row
| keyboard. I miss the notch to open the lid.
|
| It got worse with Gen4/5 which now have an awful hump
| (reverse notch) like a smartphone.
|
| The long usage of the X220 depends on the built quality but
| also on the five year replacement part support. New
| batteries and a new palm rest (cracked during a journey).
| It not just quality you pay for, it is this support level.
| And of course more memory. Apple still fails in this regard
| and barely does something when forced by the European
| Union. Anyway - Apple doesn't officially support Linux
| therefore I cannot buy them for work.
|
| This is the part wich saddens me, they do good work and the
| next MacBook will also not run fully with Linux. This kind
| of catchup things by hackers cannot be won - until the
| vendor decides you're a valuable customer. Therefore, don't
| buy them that you can run Linux. You maybe can. But these
| devices are made for macOS only.
|
| But if you want to run Linux on a MacBook? Talk your
| politicians! And send ,,messages" with your money to Apple.
| Like buying ThinkPads, Dells Developer Edition, Purism,
| System 76 and so on :)
| user_7832 wrote:
| > The magnesium body is a bless and feels a lot better to
| the skin than aluminium.
|
| Just curious, how does it feel better? My framework
| apparently has an aluminium lid and a magnesium base, and
| the mg feels "smoother" than the slightly more textured
| al... however my iPad is apparently aluminium too and is
| smooth to the touch.
| ho_schi wrote:
| It is not about smoothness.
|
| Actually the magnesium bottom feels like some high
| quality polymer/plastic. And it is leightweight.
| Therefore it doesn't feel like metal and doesn't
| transport heat/cold. Aluminum is a nice material for
| planes, cars or bikes but I avoid skin contact because it
| is uncomfortable.
|
| I guess like often it depends on how the magnesium made.
| Lenovo also uses for other parts high quality plastics
| (keyboard of course and probably the palm rest).
| bluedino wrote:
| I never kept my ThinkPads around long because of the
| screens (which they have fixed, somewhere around the T450
| timeframe.
|
| The X220/230 had that godawful 1366x768 panel. A shame
| when the 13" Air at the time had a 1440x900 panel, which
| while it wasn't amazing with the viewing angles and
| colors, it was light years ahead of the screen in
| something like a T430.
| ho_schi wrote:
| ThinkPads come usually with two panel options: The cheap
| one and the good one. Often even a third or fourth.
|
| Lenovo should only ship the good ones! If I buy a
| ThinkPad I want the good one.
|
| I struggled to get the HiDPI panel for the X13 and
| ordered it from the replacement parts. Same for the X220,
| I replaced the TN panel by _drumroll_ IPS panel.
|
| Apple takes ridiculous amounts for memory or disk but you
| always get the good stuff with the base model. This makes
| it simple and reliable for customers.
|
| _Except keyboards_
|
| The ThinkPads always win, convex key caps, better
| switches and pressure/release point, travel way, better
| layout and a TrackPoint. In some models you can still
| replace it within 30 seconds (T14). With the X13 or
| MacBook it is a horror, requires removal of the
| mainboard. Not mentioning Apples failure with the
| _TouchBar_ , which "feels" like the tried to save money
| on expensive switches by replacing them with a cheap
| touchscreen and selling this horrible downgrade as
| feature. And the infamous _butterfly_ switches are the
| reason to avoid any used older MacBook (often defective).
| Sakos wrote:
| I have a T420 with a Core i5 2500 in great condition which
| still runs great on Windows 11. Core 2 Duo just didn't have
| the performance to have longevity. Sandy Bridge and later
| really do. Windows devices last for ages and it's really
| weird pretending this is an Apple only thing.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Wouldn't an equivalent Core 2 Duo Mac be just as bad if not
| worse in the same time frame due to Apple's constant OS
| updates?
|
| I have quad core W520 from 2011, it's still VERY
| serviceable for modern usage. Not the fastest, but it even
| has USB 3 and a 1080p screen which an equivalentish MBP
| from the time would have not.
| duxup wrote:
| People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity
| of their devices really erases that price difference for me.
|
| I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well,
| I've had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow
| to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.
| exe34 wrote:
| my mid 2012 MacBook air refuses to die.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I am not so sure. I had a Pentium4 eMachine that made it
| all the way to around 2012. The same kind of life for my
| first Athlon64 machine from the same company. In both
| cases, the machines ran Linux, and they still work today.
| They were only retired because no meaningful software could
| run on them any longer. My PowerBook G4 got no where near
| that longevity, and owners of late era Intel MacBooks are
| probably going to have similar issues.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those machines should have been retired long ago because
| modern machines use much less power. (the Pentium4 was
| really bad) Of course there is a difference between a
| machine that you turn on for an hour once a week and a
| machine you leave on 24x7. The later use would pay for a
| new computer in just a few years just from savings on the
| electric bill (assuming same workload, if you then load
| the new computer with more things to do you can't see
| that)
| bityard wrote:
| The non-trivial environmental damage of building the new
| computer AND disposing of the old one should not be
| ignored. There are plenty of us who would rather pay a
| few extra bucks on our power bill rather than send
| e-waste to the landfill before it needs to be.
| bluGill wrote:
| You are instead sending CO2 into the atmosphere.
| (depending on how your get your power, but for most of us
| burning things is how we get our power. Renewables are
| coming online fast though)
| duxup wrote:
| Longevity (and certainly not performance over time) is
| not something I've ever herd associated with an eMachine.
| I think that machine might be a outlier.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk
| about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have
| been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real "bang for your
| buck" computer IMO
| opan wrote:
| With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get
| the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see
| much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do
| they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively
| impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people
| were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I have an 8GB M1 MacBook Pro and it's the perfect
| computer. I always have lots of tabs and Docker open etc.
| It works great. I want to upgrade at some point but
| probably don't need to anytime soon.
| hylaride wrote:
| 8GB is fine (on macos anyways) for what you're doing, but
| like it or not more and more AI is being (unnecessarily)
| shoved into applications and it needs memory for the GPU.
|
| Memory (both system and GPU) is usually best thing to
| future proof a computer at buy time, especially as it's
| not user-replaceable anymore.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| You can get a 512g/24gb for $1104.00 USD. Still seems
| pretty great to me. If you're disciplined with your
| internal/external storage you could also stay at a 256gb
| SSD and get 32gb of ram.
| dadbod80 wrote:
| https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/30/apple-8gb-16gb-ram-mac/
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Base model is 16gb as of the M4 release.
|
| You also don't have to get the base model. You can stay
| under $1000 while increasing to 24gb of ram.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I still manage PC that are about 15 years old, working
| happily for what their users care about.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs
| well_
|
| I have an iPhone 3G from 2008 that is currently playing
| music as I work.
|
| After 16 years, it still syncs perfectly with Apple Music
| on the current version of macOS.
|
| Unfortunately, since it can't handle modern encryption, I
| can't get it to connect to any wifi access point.
| mjangle1985 wrote:
| I still have an M1 Air. I love it.
|
| I considered upgrading but it's hard to care to cause my M1
| is just so good for what I need it for.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. Apple is incredibly difficult
| and expensive to repair. But I have been pleasantly surprised
| by the longevity and repairability of ThinkPads. I like those
| Apple M processors, but I know where I'm spending my money.
| jhenkens wrote:
| I agree on modern Mac's being difficult to repair. I also
| will say that back a decade or two ago, it was likely you'd
| need to repair your computer after four years. Now, a four
| year old Macbook Air still feels brand new to me.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Yes, MacBooks are generally more expensive to repair, but
| they also tend to not need repairs. It's quite normal to
| hear from people who are using their 7+ year old MacBook
| without any issues and are still perfectly happy with it. I
| myself still use my 2018 MacBook Pro as my main device.
|
| When considering longevity, I will agree that Thinkpads are
| probably the only device that can compete with MacBooks.
| But there are trade-offs.
|
| MacBooks are going to be lighter, better battery life, and
| have better displays. Not to mention MacOS, which is my
| preferred OS.
|
| Thinkpads usually have great Linux support and swappable
| hardware for those who like to tinker with their devices.
| They also tend to be more durable, but this adds more
| weight.
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| I still use a 2014 macbook air as my home server. It was
| my daily driver for 7 years. No complaints, still works
| perfectly. Haven't been careful with it either.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > MacBooks are going to be lighter
|
| Not going let Macs have this one, my X1 carbon is
| considerably lighter than a MBA.
|
| But generally agreeing. My last X1C lasted 8 years and
| still works perfectly, I just wanted an upgrade. My new
| one is even lighter than my old one. I opt for the FHD
| w/o touch screen and the second best processor to balance
| battery life and performance. Definitely not getting
| 18hrs battery life but 8-10 isn't something to laugh at.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I admit I was assuming they would be heavier, I didn't
| consider the X1 Carbon. When I think of Thinkpads I still
| picture the traditional IBM-style Thinkpad. A quick look
| at the specs shows the 14" X1 Carbon at 2.42lbs, 13"
| MacBook Air at 2.7 lbs, and a 14" Thinkpad E series at
| 3.17 lbs.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| MacBooks are some of the heaviest laptps on the market.
|
| The Air is the "light" one at 2.7 lbs 13" and 3.3 lbs for
| the 15"
|
| For reference, there are several 13" laptops on the
| market that are around 2 - 2.5 lbs and 15"+ that are less
| than 3 lbs
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Do any of those lighter laptops match the battery life
| and performance of the MacBook Air, while also being
| completely silent? I suppose I should have been more
| specific and stated I don't believe there are any laptops
| that can match the MacBook in all categories while being
| lighter.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >MacBooks are going to be lighter
|
| That sounds like an Apple sound bite, and it is wrong,
| compared to pretty much any MacBook competitor out
| there...
| majormajor wrote:
| I haven't gotten a new Thinkpad since the 25th
| anniversary one but that was the last I bought while
| using a few as daily drivers for a decade since 2008.
|
| The ultimate issue was that the batteries degraded on
| them on incredibly fast. I don't know if that's been
| fixed, but the ease of replacing (at least one of) the
| batteries was more than canceled out by the short life
| compared to a Mac.
| javier2 wrote:
| Yes, modern macs are stupidly hard to repair. But I am
| never using any Lenovo product again since the whole
| rootkit incident.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Agreed, hard to repair (which is a problem), but my
| experience is owning one for 8 years, and another for 4
| years now (with hopes to keep it another 6), which never
| once needed a repair.
| TylerE wrote:
| The only Mac hardware failure I've experienced in over 25
| years of ownership (My first Mac was black and had a G3
| in it and ran OS 8), I've experienced a grand total of
| one hardware failure, and that was 15+ years ago.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Oh you know what, I realized I wans't accurate. The
| 8-year MacBook I had _did_ have a failure at one point.
| They replaced the entire keyboard/trackpad for me for
| free when it did.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Indeed. However once you need the repair it's so daunting.
| Now factor in non-developed nations (prices are usually
| same or more there as well for both parts and service) and
| it's just insane. I had a 7-8 year old macbook air that I
| had bought for ~60K INR and I had to replace its SSD. Just
| because it was do be done for an Apple device even the
| outside repairperson charged ~16K (Apple "authorised"
| service centre quoted 28K + taxes with a straight face).
| That outside repair was way too costly in late 2022 for a
| 128GB SSD. Same goes for their other devices.
|
| So what's to be done? Buy their insanely costly "limited"
| extended warranty for "2 more" years? And let's say we do
| that, then? I am sure there is an argument for that.
|
| I am typing this from a M1 MacBook Pro and if it dies I am
| really not sure whether I will even be able to get it
| repaired without "feeling" fleeced, or might as well move
| back to the normal laptop + Linux world and know that a
| laptop repair will never be a "minor bankruptcy" event ;-)
|
| No, "but Apple devices last long" doesn't cut it. So do
| non-Apple devices, yes they do. And if they need repair you
| don't at all fret w/ or w/o warranty.
|
| I am not sure how many here on HN will be able to connect
| with this but that hanging Damocles' sword is not a nice
| thing to have around when you use a costly Apple device.
|
| Making it easy and cheap/affordable for their devices to be
| repaired should not be an option left for OEMs.
| hurutparittya wrote:
| I'm always surprised when people speak highly of Apple
| devices here. While they do have certain advantages, there
| are some issues that should be dealbreakers for tech literate
| people. (in my own, possibly biased opinion at least)
|
| In case of Macbooks, it's the fact that they refuse to
| provide an official GPU driver for Linux and general poor
| support for things outside the walled garden. The Asahi stuff
| is cool and all, but come on, is a 3.4 trillion dollar
| company really going to just stand there and watch some
| volunteers struggling to provide support for their
| undocumented hardware without doing anything substantial to
| help? That sounds straight up insulting to me, especially for
| such a premium product.
|
| For iphones, it's the fact that you are not allowed to run
| your own code on YOUR OWN DEVICE without paying the Apple
| troll toll and passing the honestly ridiculous Apple Store
| requirements.
|
| And of course, in both cases, they actively sabotage third
| party repairs of their devices.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > there are some issues that should be dealbreakers for
| tech literate people. (in my own, possibly biased opinion
| at least)
|
| I know you admit right after that your opinion is biased,
| but it's almost ludicrous to assert that all the
| programmers and engineers using Macs and iPhones by choice
| must just not be tech literate.
|
| > In case of Macbooks, it's the fact that they refuse to
| provide an official GPU driver for Linux
|
| MBPs are so much better than any other laptop that, with a
| few caveats[1], running Linux in a VM on a top-of-the-line
| MBP is a much nicer experience than using Linux natively on
| any other laptop. So while it'd be nice if there were more
| first-party support for Linux, it's certainly not a deal-
| breaker for "tech-literate" people. (Not to mention the
| fact that there are "tech-literate" people who use macOS
| and not Linux, so it wouldn't matter to them at all).
|
| > general poor support for things outside the walled garden
|
| macOS isn't a walled garden, so I don't know what you mean.
| You can download any software you want from anywhere you
| want and run it on your laptop, and Apple doesn't do
| anything to try to prevent this.
|
| > The Asahi stuff is cool and all, but come on, is a 3.4
| trillion dollar company really going to just stand there
| and watch some volunteers struggling to provide support for
| their undocumented hardware without doing anything
| substantial to help? That sounds straight up insulting to
| me, especially for such a premium product.
|
| Now it's unclear whether your point is "I don't understand
| why people use Macs because there are objective drawbacks"
| or "I don't think people should use Macs because Apple does
| stuff that I find annoying". You're blending the two here
| but they are meaningfully separate points. I've discussed
| the practical point already above, but as for the stuff you
| subjectively find annoying: surely the only real answer is
| that lots of other people just subjectively don't care as
| much as you.
|
| > For iphones, it's the fact that you are not allowed to
| run your own code on YOUR OWN DEVICE without paying the
| Apple troll toll and passing the honestly ridiculous Apple
| Store requirements.
|
| I don't care about this at all. I've never wanted to run my
| own code on my own iOS device except when I was working on
| iOS apps and had an Apple developer account through work.
| I, like the vast majority of people, use my phone as a
| browsing/messaging/media consumption device, not as a
| general-purpose computer.
|
| If Apple tried to prevent me from running my own code on my
| own _MacBook_ , it _would_ be a deal-breaker, but as I
| already said above, they don 't.
|
| In conclusion I think you've confused "tech-literate
| person" and "geek who wants to be able to tweak/configure
| everything". Indeed there is a large overlap between those
| sets, but they're not quite the same thing.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41997107
| resource_waste wrote:
| >how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade
|
| Are your laptops not lasting 10 years? (battery swaps are a
| must though)
|
| The only reason I switched laptops was that I wanted to do AI
| Art and local LLMs.
|
| I have so many old laptops and desktops that each of my 5
| kids have their own. They are even playing half-modern games
| on them.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Using a laptop with 8gb RAM for a decade is an exercise in
| frustration
| bzzzt wrote:
| Only if you insist on running software that needs more RAM,
| in which case you shouldn't have bought it.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Apple should not have sold devices with 8GB or less back
| in 2018. Them doing it in 2024 is a sign that they think
| their users are idiots.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I just bought the original M1 Air 8GB for my spouse from
| walmart for $650, to replace an aging intel Air 8GB. The
| difference is stark. The M1 Air is a pleasure to use,
| even with the inevitable library's worth of browser tabs.
|
| Plenty of people have no need for more than 8GB. My
| spouse. My mom. My english-major son. Meanwhile, my M2 is
| saying I have 72GB in use, with IntelliJ #1 at 6.05GB. I
| would not be happy with 8GB. Sounds like you wouldnt be
| either. So don't buy one.
| TigerAndDragonB wrote:
| _> ...how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a
| decade; these devices are built to last..._
|
| This is no longer true for me. I've been an Apple fan since
| the Apple ][ days, and reluctantly left the ecosystem last
| year. The hardware walled garden with soldered-on components
| and components tied down to specific units for ostensible
| privacy and security reasons (I don't buy those reasons),
| combined with the steadily degrading OS polish in fine
| attention to detail, for me personally, meant I could no
| longer justify the cognitive load to continue with a Mac
| laptop as my daily driver. While others might point to a cost
| or/or value differential, I'm in the highly privileged
| position to be insensitive to those factors.
|
| Last straw was an board-soldered SSD that quit well before I
| was willing to upgrade, and even Louis Rossman's shop said it
| would cost way more to desolder and solder a new one on than
| the entire laptop is worth. Bought a Framework the same day,
| when it arrived I restored my data files to it and been
| running it as my daily driver ever since. The Mac laptop is
| still sitting here, as I keep hoping to figure out when to
| find time to develop my wave soldering skills to try my hand
| at saving it from the landfill, or break down and
| unsustainably pay for the repair (I do what I can to avoid
| perpetuating dark patterns, but it is a Sisyphean effort).
|
| I found myself in a position of having to think increasingly
| more about working around the Mac ecosystem instead of
| working invisibly within it (like a fish in water not having
| to think about water), that it no longer made sense to stick
| with it. It has definitively lost the "It Just Works" polish
| that bound me so tightly to the ecosystem in the past. I see
| no functional difference in my daily work patterns using a
| Mac laptop versus a Framework running Fedora.
|
| To be sure, there are a lot of areas I have to work around on
| the Framework-Fedora daily driver, but for my personal work
| patterns, in my personal needs, I evaluated them to be
| roughly the same amount of time and cognitive load I spent on
| the Mac. Maybe Framework-Fedora is slightly worse, but close
| enough that I'd rather throw my hat into the more open ring
| than the increasingly closed walled garden Apple's direction
| definitely is taking us, that does not align with my vision
| for our computing future. It does not hurt that experimenting
| with local LLM's and various DevOps tooling for my work's
| Linux-based infrastructure is way easier and frictionless on
| Fedora for me, though YMMV for certain. It has already been
| and will be an interesting journey, it has been fun so far
| and brought back some fond memories of my early Apple ][,
| Macintosh 128K, and Mac OS X days.
| bluedino wrote:
| I have a personal M1 13" Air, and a work M3 16" Pro, and
| other than the silly 8GB limitation, I don't notice much of a
| difference in what I do when using the Air.
| oorza wrote:
| There's three buckets of performance in interactive
| software: so fast it doesn't matter to the user, slow
| enough the user notices but doesn't lose focus, and slow
| enough the user has time to lose focus. The lines are
| obviously different for each person, which is why some
| people feel that software is "fast enough" well before
| others do.
|
| The jump from an i9 to an M1 moved a lot of tasks from
| group 3 into 2, some tasks from group 2 into group 1, and
| was the biggest perceived single-machine performance leap
| for me in my professional career. I have an M1 Max or Ultra
| on my work machine and an M3 Ultra in my personal machine -
| after two years of the work machine being so visibly
| faster, I caved and upgraded my personal. The M3 Ultra
| moves a handful of things from group 2 to group 1 but it's
| not enough to move anything out of group 3.
| outworlder wrote:
| > how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade;
| these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term
| support from Apple itself and the Linux community.
|
| Anecdotal but I have a White Macbook from 2010. It's sitting
| on a shelf not because it doesn't work (minus the battery),
| but because it's too outdated to be of much use. And there's
| a small crack in the case.
|
| I have a Macbook Pro from 2016. I still whip it out from time
| to time when I don't want to use my latest one for whatever
| reason (say, network troubleshooting). It works fine. Even
| the battery still holds charge. If those two had USB-C (and
| charging over that port) I'd probably use them more often.
| Their keyboards is also pleasant (since they are before the
| scissor key nonsense).
|
| My company has thousands of Macbooks. It's rare that I see
| anyone at all with issues. They aren't perfect, but the build
| quality is far better than most PC laptops and so is the
| attention to detail. The price premium kinda blows, but the M
| line made them way better.
| jpurnell wrote:
| I power up my Titanium Powerbook at least once a year or
| so. 23 years old and works just fine. I last opened it July
| 4, 2023, and there was a software update waiting for me.
| patates wrote:
| > what a reward when it works
|
| as someone who's been coding for more than 20 years, the
| happiest and the most depressed moments in my career both came
| during a hardware project I participated only for 4 months.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Too many projects get dropped the moment the next shiny ray-
| traced toy comes along.
|
| Well.... (from the article):
|
| >"frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature"
|
| I couldn't agree more, on both counts.
| skoczko wrote:
| Since bringing modern OpenGL and Vulkan onto Apple Silicon is
| impossible without an emulation layer anyway, could,
| theoretically, a native Metal API for Linux be created? Or is
| Metal too ingrained in macOS SDKs? MoltenVK is attempting to
| solve the same issues Alyssa was talking about in her talk [1,
| the last comment on the issue is hers]
|
| [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1524
| Twisell wrote:
| Nothing is barring Apple from supporting Vulkan natively on
| MacOS. This is essentially the closing statement of Alyssa
| Rosenzweig's talk.
|
| With Apple knowledge of internal documents they are the best
| positioned to produce an even better low level implementation.
|
| At this point the main blockroad is the opinionated point that
| Metal porting is the only official supported way to go.
|
| If Valve pull up a witch-crafted way to run AAA games on Mac
| without Apple support that would be an interesting landscape.
| And maybe would force Apple to re-consider their approach if
| they don't want to be cornered on their own platform...
| bri3d wrote:
| > If Valve pull up a witch-crafted way to run AAA games on
| Mac without Apple support that would be an interesting
| landscape. And maybe would force Apple to re-consider their
| approach if they don't want to be cornered on their own
| platform...
|
| Right, except that Game Porting Toolkit and D3DMetal was an
| exact response to this scenario. Whether it's the right
| approach, time will tell, but Apple definitely already headed
| this one off at the pass.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Game Porting Toolkit isn't a response in this scenario. All
| advertising for GPTK is aimed squarely at publishers, and
| even Whiskey has to pull a binary out of a back alley for
| D3DMetal. Apple is essentially doing nothing and hoping it
| works.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Metal porting is the only official supported way to go.
|
| Apple already provides its own native implementation of a
| DirectX to Metal emulation layer.
| Twisell wrote:
| And yet I see more Game available for steamdeck than for
| apple Silicon... Maybe because porting as opposed to
| emulating requires action on developer side.
|
| And this is especially true for existing game that "aren't
| worth porting" but are still fun to play. (Is there a
| Vulkan to Metal / OpenGL to Metal in Gaming toolkit? is it
| the NexStep?)
|
| There is actually a sweet spot here for Valve that could
| benefit everyone: - Valve as a necessary
| third party - Gamers to access a wider catalog
| - Apple so they don't have to bother developing a porting
| process for old games
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Maybe because porting as opposed to emulating requires
| action on developer side.
|
| The Steam Deck is also just emulating native Windows
| APIs, but on Linux.
|
| https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
|
| Game compatibility isn't 100% with either, and both have
| community maintained lists with compatibility
| information.
| aseipp wrote:
| I don't see why not. There are, after all, implementations of
| DirectX for Linux too, which is how Proton works. But I'm not
| sure if it would be better to build that API as a layer on top
| of Vulkan (completely "client side", like MoltenVK or dxvk do)
| or actually integrate it more deeply into Mesa. The first is
| certainly easier to start with, I guess.
| wwalexander wrote:
| Alyssa Rosenzweig deserves a Turing Award!
| helsinki wrote:
| Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by
| running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever
| hack and a potential performance bottleneck. It makes me wonder
| about the long-term implications of such workarounds. Are we
| reaching a point where the complexity of bridging these gaps
| outweighs the benefits, especially when dealing with proprietary
| hardware designed to be a closed ecosystem?
|
| This also touches on a broader question about the future of open-
| source efforts on platforms that are inherently restrictive.
| While it's inspiring to see games like Control running at 45fps
| on an M1 MAX with open-source drivers, it begs the question:
| Should the community continue to invest significant resources
| into making closed systems more open, or should efforts be
| redirected toward promoting more open hardware standards?
|
| Apple's approach to hardware design warrants criticism. By
| creating GPUs with limitations that hinder standard
| functionalities like tessellation shaders and using non-standard
| page sizes, Apple places unnecessary obstacles in the path of
| developers. This closed ecosystem not only complicates the work
| for open-source contributors but also stifles innovation that
| could benefit all users.
| i000 wrote:
| What do you mean by "should the community do X" ? The Community
| is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective,
| it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their
| talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You
| imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles
| innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.
| helsinki wrote:
| You should re-read the last paragraph of my comment and note
| that it is directed towards Apple.
| i000 wrote:
| I said 'imply' because your response is not to an article
| on apples walled garden but work of open source developers.
| I agree with you 100% on criticizing apple but not on
| whether someone should put effort in making it more open.
| umanwizard wrote:
| OP was talking about the middle paragraph of your comment,
| not the last one. I.e. the one in which you're talking
| about what "the community" should do, which is not really a
| meaningful question.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy
| by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a
| clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck.
|
| In her initial announcement, she mentions VM memory overhead as
| the reason that 16 Gigs of RAM will be the minimum requirement
| to emulate most Windows games.
| oorza wrote:
| I am genuinely curious if those barriers have technical
| justifications. There's a pretty stark difference (to me, at
| least) between ignoring standards in order to reinvent better
| wheels and intentionally diverging from standards to prevent
| compatibility.
|
| It's a question of whether they're _not_ investing resources to
| maintain standard behavior or they are actively investing
| resources to diverge from it. If it's the former, I don't find
| any fault in it, personally speaking.
| jahewson wrote:
| > Should the community continue to invest significant resources
| into making closed systems more open, or should efforts be
| redirected toward promoting more open hardware standards?
|
| False dichotomy. Do both!
| mft_ wrote:
| > Apple's approach to hardware design warrants criticism. By
| creating GPUs with limitations that hinder standard
| functionalities like tessellation shaders and using non-
| standard page sizes, Apple places unnecessary obstacles in the
| path of developers. This closed ecosystem not only complicates
| the work for open-source contributors but also stifles
| innovation that could benefit all users.
|
| Apple designs its hardware to suit its own ends, and its own
| ends only. It's obvious to everyone here that this supports
| their closed business model, which actually works for them very
| well - they make excellent hardware and (some software
| flakiness more recently notwithstanding) the median user will
| generally have an excellent time with their hardware + software
| as a result.
|
| So they're not placing _" unnecessary obstacles in the path of
| developers"_ at all by designing their hardware as they do -
| they're just focused on designing hardware to suit their own
| needs.
|
| (Also note that if their hardware wasn't excellent, there
| wouldn't be such interest in using it in other, non-Apple-
| intended ways.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-01 23:01 UTC)