.
http://www.geeks3d.com/20150508/os-x-not-a-serious-3d-graphics-development-platform/
I have been fed up with the growing lack of OpenGL updates with MacOSX. It is limiting the development of artistic tools using things such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Vuo. I have bought into the TD bucket to branch out into the power of the new generation of Nvidia graphics cards and DirectX. I will still be working with Mac but less and less. When Vuo becomes cross platform it will be the most powerful visual programming tool for artists that I can think of.
in light of this thread [ https://community.vuo.org/t/-/5095 ] although I’m tempted to, I’m not going to spend my votes on this since it is kind of not a traditional feature request and is not likely to get lots of votes from existing users (who currently probably mostly use Mac as their primary platform since VUO has only ever worked on Mac OS and currently still only works on Mac OS etc…)
After the recent HW launch (nov. 2020) this seems like an ever more inevitable route. Missing eGPU support, portability > power, limited CPU resources and a cost/benefit ratio that is off the charts in a negative way as compared to other solutions unfortunately makes the platform less attractive.
As a cross-platform user it has annoyed me for years exactly how much more resources are available at a much, much lower price-point for PCs than what you get from Apple. The latest offerings didn’t help.
I do get that most current Vuo users are Mac/Apple only, but I also would suspect a significant potential for expanding the user-base with a Windows port. From personal experiences, I can say that the more or less exclusive mac use for VJs at festivals in 2015 dropped fast, and that last year ('19) they were more or less extinct. I can’t see this changing anytime soon.
While I agree that a windows port would be nice and even expand the community I don’t know that now is a good time. Intel architecture has been stagnating for quite a number of years and their future looks a little concerning but AMD has managed to do some really nice things in their Ryzen 7 &9 series. ARM based architecture is advancing much faster than X86 architecture and will soon over take it. So it would be a lot of wasted energies spent on support at this time. Once everything is over to ARM the port would likely be easier.
Right now Apple has the advantage in the ARM world in that they can design the chips to match their software exactly. So they’re building it to handle multiple 4K+ video streams using dedicated codec engines including built in HDR processing, integrating a machine learning engine so your CPU cores and GPU can focus on other things. I was disappointed to learn eGPU weren’t supported on the first generation on Apple Silicon machines too but I’m waiting to see what the performance specs are on their integrated GPU. There not anything like the integrated graphics were are used to seeing from Intel and they haven’t really given us much real world performance information other than that it features 2.6 teraflops of performance however with the other built-in dedicated engines mentioned before this will perform better than a discrete GPU with the same teraflop performance.
I’m keeping an eye out for the first real world benchmarking of these systems. I’m hoping to see something we like.
From the limited data set Apple provided, a somewhat educated guess would place it somewhere around a gtx 1060 (Apple’s comparisons was seemingly in regards to the Intel Iris Plus 645). This also aligns with the recommended graphics card for Baldurs Gate 3. This is speculation, but I’ll be surprised if I’m very far off (we’ll see how well this comment ages in a couple weeks ;) )
The part about accelerating their software is absolutely correct, but that is also the problem. Apple specific software and software using the same hw features (without competing with Apple software) will benefit. As Apple doesn’t focus on graphics intensive applications, they have no incentive to improve in this area (which also should be pretty obvious looking back at the last 10 years). I fully expect them to add a “FX engine core” or some other marketing-aligned sales pitch if post fx becomes a focus area though. That won’t help generative stuff.
I think going forward Apple will be for convenience and battery, power will be had with Windows/Linux (which both have been on ARM for some time now as well).
Magneson wrote "I fully expect them to add a “FX engine core” "
At least for Final Cut Pro, I think the Apple Motion render engine (along with any FxPlugs installed for Motion) currently performs this function (FX in FCP are templates made in Motion - basically Motion projects set up to reference the media in the FCP timeline) and Motion/FCP uses “Metal” (as of a year ago) ; Metal Overview - Apple Developer
Would be really sad if they not where to support eGPU in the future.
They’ve deployed eGPU support, you think they gonna drop it ?
Anyway, yeah Apple doing Apple stuff anyway :(
Apple wrote in it’s developer notes for porting to Apple Silicon:
Don’t assume a discrete GPU means better performance. The integrated GPU in Apple processors is optimized for high performance graphics tasks.
…so I’m looking forward to seeing some real world testing of these new processors. :)