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metal api capabilities
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Chidorin Takamori
24th Imperial Crusade
Amarr Empire
#1 - 2017-05-26 10:17:53 UTC
Yeah, I know, there were already some posts about "will there be metal support", "would be nice of you to add metal support" and answers "no need for small user base", "better add vulkan support", "EVE is built for Direct X and wine for everything else". So I just leave some benchmarks here and may be others will do the same as more and more metal benchmarks came out and in the near future we will see native support

Metal in War Thunder

intel hd 4000 ~ x1,5 fps
nvidia 640m ~ x2 fps

p.s. it's been almost 2 years since metal api was announced for macos
Amarisen Gream
The.Kin.of.Jupiter
#2 - 2017-05-29 13:06:04 UTC
the issue is the whole back end of eve would need to be redone... i'm the one that started the original post.

they would pretty much have to go through and rewrite the whole game to work natively with MacOS. Something that would take them years. or a magic pony.

"The Lord loosed upon them his fierce anger All of his fury and rage. He dispatched against them a band of Avenging Angels" - The Scriptures, Book II, Apocalypse 10:1

#NPCLivesMatter #Freetheboobs
Suren Scott
Extra-galactic Cooperative
#3 - 2017-05-29 19:34:24 UTC
Eve is built for DirectX on Windows.

On Mac, Wine is running the Windows version. Wine translates the DirectX calls into OpenGL calls.

CCP devs who work on the Mac port contribute back to the Wine project. If Wine's Mac version starts translating to Metal instead of OpenGL, then CCP will be working with Metal.

The reason the Wine project doesn't currently use Metal is because Wine is not Mac-only, and Metal is Mac-only. Additionally, Metal requires 10.9 or newer, and open-source projects like their backwards compatibility. You can still build Wineskin wrappers for 10.6 (although this limits the wrapper's abilities; I think it now defaults to 10.8 or newer).

When even Crossover, one of the biggest commercial uses of Wine, has to spend over a year determining the feasibility of doing that when half of their business is Wine on Mac, you're not going to see CCP take the lead. Star Trek Online decided to flat-out drop Mac support and provide an amortized refund to their Mac-using lifetime subscribers, rather than deal with it; effectively paying their Mac customers to leave.

While CCP has stated a commitment to support a Mac client, I'm almost certain their ability to fulfill that commitment will mean the delay of the Dx9 phase-out and/or another developer (such as Crossover) doing the heavy lifting.