Metal API for MacOS Sierra 10.12

They seem to have a new tessellation path. They seem to have replaced the vertex shader with a compute kernel. And gotten rid of geometry shader altogether.
 
So unpopular on OSX that it's almost impossible to find anything written about the new changes. I'm still not sure what features were missing that basically every company that said they were going to start using it on mac backed out.
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10422/apple-announces-macos-sierra/2

On the API side of matters, Apple’s Metal graphics API is receiving a major update with Sierra. A new GPU family is being introduced (OSX_GPUFamily1_v2), which enables a bunch of new features on the latest macOS. Of particular interest here is geometry tessellation, which has been present in all Macs since 2012, but has not been exposed in Metal until now. Notably, Apple calls Metal’s tessellation feature a “flexible compute-based approach” which is a bit confusing since it can be construed multiple ways. However Apple’s documentation confirms that this is a traditional tessellation pipeline, using a combination of a fixed function tessellator and compute-based hull/domain/vertex shading. Though outside the scope of this article, tessellation is also being brought to the latest generation iOS devices under iOS 10, so developers should be able to hit the ground running with tessellation.
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Blizzard Entertainment is building a Metal rendering path for World of Warcraft: Legion. From what I've read from beta forum some weeks ago it wasn't working very well though, but special-case coding for a subset of Macs probably isn't a priority for Blizzard when there's still so many other kinks to work out of the game... Maybe in the future they'll get it working properly and actually contribute a speed boost over OGL. :p
 
* waits for @sebbbi to update on whether Metal is now useful


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UE 4.13 looks like it may end up with better Metal support for the equivalent of Shader Model 5. Not sure if that will require MacOS Sierra or not.
 
Can't find any official benchmarks, but it seems like World of Warcraft now has metal support, at least in some beta patch, and people with discrete gpus are reporting very good performance improvements. I hope Heroes of the Storm gets support soon. Even if it just reduces my cpu utilization, that will do a lot to lower heat with my laptop.
 
Arwin said:
* waits for @sebbbi to update on whether Metal is now useful
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Heh. I never said Metal was useless :)

The lack of indirect draw/dispatch at launch was a roadblock for modern rendering pipelines, but in general the API and the shading language are really nice. It certainly beats DX11 and OpenGL, but Vulkan and DX12 are slightly ahead in features (and SM 6.0 widens the gap).
 
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-13-released

Mac Metal now has initial Shader Model 5 support enabled by default. This exposes all the available features of Metal on Mac OS X 10.11.6 that are applicable to Unreal Engine 4.

...

  • Implements the RHI thread & parallel translation features to parallelise render command dispatch.

  • Exposes support for Metal compute shaders.

  • Exposes asynchronous compute support on AMD GPUs.

  • Enables high-end rendering features previously unavailable on Mac, including:
    • High quality dynamic exposure (a.k.a. Eye Adaptation).

    • Compute-shader reflection environments - only available on discrete GPUs for 4.13.

    • DistanceField Ambient Occlusion - only available on discrete GPUs for 4.13.

    • DistanceField Shadowing - only available on discrete GPUs for 4.13.
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