3saul Posted June 21, 2015 Report Share Posted June 21, 2015 With the announcement of Metal for Mac just occuring, is this something SMP could leverage to improve performance on the Mac? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cameron Posted June 21, 2015 Report Share Posted June 21, 2015 Not until X-Plane uses it first (which will probably be unlikely on a large scale). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben Russell Posted June 22, 2015 Report Share Posted June 22, 2015 (edited) . Edited June 22, 2015 by Ben Russell 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3saul Posted June 22, 2015 Author Report Share Posted June 22, 2015 shame Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sundog Posted June 22, 2015 Report Share Posted June 22, 2015 Cameron's right that we can't even think about Metal until X-Plane offers support for it. However, I honestly don't think it would offer anything close to the grandiose performance benefits Apple is promising. SkyMaxx Pro already uses a lot of tricks and extensions within OpenGL to avoid the performance bottlenecks Metal aims to eliminate. Improving performance on MacOS would be much better served by offering more powerful GPU's on Mac desktop systems; most MacOS performance problems reported with SkyMaxx Pro are due to insufficient video memory. So, changing SkyMaxx Pro to make more efficient use of limited video memory would probably have a bigger performance impact than moving to Metal. SkyMaxx Pro 3 will do that, by the way. Personally I would prefer that Apple adopt Vulkan, like everybody else. Speaking as a developer, I'd rather not be forced to learn an entire new programming language (Objective C) and API (Metal)! I'm hoping they will support both in the end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3saul Posted June 22, 2015 Author Report Share Posted June 22, 2015 Good news about SMP3. How far away is it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cameron Posted June 22, 2015 Report Share Posted June 22, 2015 Good news about SMP3. How far away is it? We don't give any kind of release dates. Sorry! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexcolka Posted June 26, 2015 Report Share Posted June 26, 2015 A screenshot maybe? :-) Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnMAXX Posted June 26, 2015 Report Share Posted June 26, 2015 Plenty of them in "what did u fly today" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asheft Posted June 27, 2015 Report Share Posted June 27, 2015 ...most MacOS performance problems reported with SkyMaxx Pro are due to insufficient video memory. So, changing SkyMaxx Pro to make more efficient use of limited video memory would probably have a bigger performance impact than moving to Metal. SkyMaxx Pro 3 will do that, by the way. I'd think that Skymaxx would be more taxing on pixel fill rate than VRAM... maybe I'm wrong about that though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sundog Posted June 27, 2015 Report Share Posted June 27, 2015 (edited) I'd think that Skymaxx would be more taxing on pixel fill rate than VRAM... maybe I'm wrong about that though. It depends. The thing is, once you run out of VRAM and start swapping memory, you're pretty much done from a performance standpoint. A lot of people are running close to that wall as it is, especially when you're running with custom scenery. Fill rate can be the bottleneck before you hit that point, but it's nowhere near as bad of a penalty. And from what I understand, Metal can't really do anything about fill rate. Edited June 27, 2015 by sundog Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mgurreta Posted September 20, 2020 Report Share Posted September 20, 2020 On 6/21/2015 at 4:51 PM, Cameron said: Not until X-Plane uses it first (which will probably be unlikely on a large scale). On 6/22/2015 at 4:32 AM, sundog said: Cameron's right that we can't even think about Metal until X-Plane offers support for it. However, I honestly don't think it would offer anything close to the grandiose performance benefits Apple is promising. SkyMaxx Pro already uses a lot of tricks and extensions within OpenGL to avoid the performance bottlenecks Metal aims to eliminate. Improving performance on MacOS would be much better served by offering more powerful GPU's on Mac desktop systems; most MacOS performance problems reported with SkyMaxx Pro are due to insufficient video memory. So, changing SkyMaxx Pro to make more efficient use of limited video memory would probably have a bigger performance impact than moving to Metal. SkyMaxx Pro 3 will do that, by the way. Personally I would prefer that Apple adopt Vulkan, like everybody else. Speaking as a developer, I'd rather not be forced to learn an entire new programming language (Objective C) and API (Metal)! I'm hoping they will support both in the end. API (Metal)! I'm hoping they will support both in the end. Since X-Plane now supports Metal, is there any plan for SkyMaxx to support it as well? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cameron Posted September 20, 2020 Report Share Posted September 20, 2020 3 hours ago, mgurreta said: Since X-Plane now supports Metal, is there any plan for SkyMaxx to support it as well? Thanks Apple does not allow for the proper OpenGl call access when Metal is in use, so we are unable to bring this to Metal. Laminar would need to have a Metal plugin SDK, and for now that's not on their table. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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