[opensource-dev] Mac OS X Metal support

[Geenz Spad]

Additionally, effective OpenGL != effective Metal.  In order to really take advantage of Metal, you would be looking at a massive rewrite of the viewer's rendering code to fit within the "Metal mindset" making a number of Metal specific optimizations along the way, and optimizations may not entirely fit within how the viewer currently does things today (for example, Metal tends to work best when you're submitting commands from multiple threads into a command buffer instead of everything happening on a single thread).  You could have better performance yes, but it would take a lot of work to port the viewer over to Metal in a way that would yield substantially better performance.

It's a lot like Direct3D 9 vs. Direct3D 10 and the supposed gains you could get with Direct3D 10 - they were only really there if you tailored your renderer to DX10, otherwise direct ports between APIs would frequently result in slower performance at worse, the same performance at best.

> On Dec 13, 2015, at 10:10 PM, Cinder Roxley <cinder at alchemyviewer.org> wrote:
> 
> MetalGL is an OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation that uses the Metal framework, so you’d be trading off performance and rewriting a pretty big chunk of the rendering code for not much gain. Furthermore, MetalGL’s license is incompatible with the LGPL.
> 
> -- 
> Cinder Roxley
> Sent with Airmail
> 
> On December 13, 2015 at 7:41:02 PM, Gistya Eusebio (gistya at gmail.com <mailto:gistya at gmail.com>) wrote:
> 
>> I heard that there is a project called MetalGL that aims to compile OpenGL shaders using Metal... might make a port easier. Either way it would be awesome to see an SL client written from the ground up in Swift running Metal ... :D Maybe for SL 2 eh?
>> 
>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 6:43 PM, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence) <oz at lindenlab.com <mailto:oz at lindenlab.com>> wrote:
>> On 2015-10-24 05:14 , Laurent Bechir wrote:
>>> Hello
>>> 
>>> Do you have some plan concerning the support of Metal in the viewer ?
>>> 
>> Not at this time.
>> 
>> --
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