OS X Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Metal!

[wubsylol]

I can't say anything about SC2, but in HoS, the Metal renderer is labeled as "beta" – and obviously for a reason: on my 2016 15" rMBP with the AMD 460, the game keeps stut-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tering, completely independent of the settings. There are also a few visible glitches. Between the stutters, it seems to run minimally smoother than the default OpenGL 2.1 renderer, but without means to display any actual metrics, it's hard to say.

Needs more work.

At least the number of available games with official Metal support has effectively almost doubled with that…

It's labelled as such in SC2 as well.
On my 780m GTX iMac, performance is definitely smoother, though not dramatically increased. Using Metal (or the new OpenGL 4.1 renderer) does seem to fix some of the in-engine cutscene lighting oddities I've noticed since Legacy of the Void launched.

 

[Jeaz]

Back in the days when Cider-ports were he most common way of bringing Windows games to OSX, performance was really a big issue. But now, the only game I've had disappointing performance in, is with Rocket League.

 

[Eric5h5]

I switched to the Metal renderer in SC2 and played several rounds...seems fine, though I didn't have any performance limitations before so nothing really changed for me (R9 280X).

--Eric

 

[casperes1996]

I can't say anything about SC2, but in HoS, the Metal renderer is labeled as "beta" – and obviously for a reason: on my 2016 15" rMBP with the AMD 460, the game keeps stut-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tering, completely independent of the settings. There are also a few visible glitches. Between the stutters, it seems to run minimally smoother than the default OpenGL 2.1 renderer, but without means to display any actual metrics, it's hard to say.

Which version of macOS are you on?

Back in the days when Cider-ports were he most common way of bringing Windows games to OSX, performance was really a big issue. But now, the only game I've had disappointing performance in, is with Rocket League.

Oh, God! Cider... That **** was so horrible you needed a super computer to run Spore... Bet my 5k iMac can't run the cider port at more than 720p minimum settings... Thank goodness we got past that.

 

[Eric5h5]

Well, Cider is just WINE; performance tends to be reasonably good in most cases. The only real exception I can think of was older versions of OS X that had a bug with AMD drivers which caused certain games in WINE to perform really badly on AMD cards, but that was fixed years ago. Native ports are almost always better though...e.g. the original WINE-based version of The Witcher had decent performance, but crashed too much. When they re-ported it to a native version, the performance was pretty much the same here, but the crashes disappeared (almost) completely.

--Eric

 

[casperes1996]

Well, Cider is just WINE; performance tends to be reasonably good in most cases. The only real exception I can think of was older versions of OS X that had a bug with AMD drivers which caused certain games in WINE to perform really badly on AMD cards, but that was fixed years ago. Native ports are almost always better though...e.g. the original WINE-based version of The Witcher had decent performance, but crashed too much. When they re-ported it to a native version, the performance was pretty much the same here, but the crashes disappeared (almost) completely.

To be honest, I didn't know the original Witcher was ever upgraded to a native port, but I too noticed that it suddenly stopped having a lot of glitchy behaviours. (when it was Wine, changing a setting made the entire screen black until I restarted the game, and with luck it'd return to showing the game). Though I did also see a performance boost. It wasn't massive, so I attributed it other things, but it did improve.
Regardless, sometimes, Cider/Wines does fairly well, but most of the time it's horrendously bad when it comes to performance. In the case of Spore, I stand by what I wrote. Same goes for Sims 3, although I don't know if that's just an appalling native port or another case of Cider. Comparing to the original release on the same hardware really puts things into perspective. Or even comparing to how much better things can be on the same OS, with other products that should be much more demanding, but run a lot better, i.e. pretty much all of Feral's ports.

 

[Janichsan]

Which version of macOS are you on?

10.12.3.

 

[jeanlain]

It's been reported on a French website (which is now down ) that the Metal version of SC 2 is basically twice faster on a certain configuration.

EDIT here is the link: http://www.mac4ever.com/actu/117688...oes-of-the-storm-et-ca-envoie-du-steak-benchs

 

[wubsylol]

It's been reported on a French website (which is now down ) that the Metal version of SC 2 is basically twice faster on a certain configuration.

EDIT here is the link: http://www.mac4ever.com/actu/117688...oes-of-the-storm-et-ca-envoie-du-steak-benchs

That speaks more to the poor state of AMDs OpenGL drivers, but it's awesome nonetheless.

 

[MrUNIMOG]

Hi everyone. We originally announced that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided would be coming to Mac by the end of the year, because that is when we thought it would be ready. We really appreciate everyone being patient with us about that, as we wanted to get it out sooner!

Metal is a young API and is still evolving. We are indeed waiting for further updates to it, but we can’t say when those updates will be made. As with any of our games, we won’t release Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Mac until we’re confident that it performs well.

As soon as we have news on a release date we’ll update our website and social media, so do keep an eye out and once again, thanks for your patience!

Any news yet, about when we can expect an announcement? More like another year or more like two months?

I sure could just buy the game on Steam and play it in Boot Camp, it's even on sale right now, but for now I'm still holding off my purchase since I want it to count as a Mac purchase. I don't want to wait forever though...

 

[Janichsan]

Current number of Mac ports delayed indefinitely until Apple fixes Metal: five – and counting…

(DXMD, Total War: Warhammer, Dirt Rally, Obduction, and Hitman.)

 

[wubsylol]

Current number of Mac ports delayed indefinitely until Apple fixes Metal: five – and counting…

(DXMD, Total War: Warhammer, Dirt Rally, Obduction, and Hitman.)

GET YOUR PITCHFORKS!

 

[Janichsan]

GET YOUR PITCHFORKS!

Don't tell me you don't find this situation frustrating.

 

[imacken]

Don't tell me you don't find this situation frustrating.

Frustrating is not the word. As I have posted elsewhere, I am seriously concerned about the state of Mac gaming.
Have we had anything from Aspyr except Civ 6 in the last 9 months? Feral have cancelled F1 2015 and 'delayed' 5 others as you mentioned, Frontier didn't release a Mac version of Elite Dangerous: Horizons, etc. etc.
Very, very sad indeed.

 

[casperes1996]

and Hitman

Whoah, whoah, whoah... The new episodic Hitman game was meant to be released on Mac?

 

[MrUNIMOG]

Current number of Mac ports delayed indefinitely until Apple fixes Metal: five – and counting…

(DXMD, Total War: Warhammer, Dirt Rally, Obduction, and Hitman.)

Here's hoping Apple does something about it, at least with 10.13...

 

[casperes1996]

Here's hoping Apple does something about it, at least with 10.13...

I'd say waiting until the Fall isn't very hopefull at all. I actually was under the impression that the problems had been taken care of in 10.12.3

 

[MrUNIMOG]

I'd say waiting until the Fall isn't very hopefull at all. I actually was under the impression that the problems had been taken care of in 10.12.3

Perhaps they have, and Feral now just needs some more time to finish those games which they couldn't before because of issues with Metal? Let's hope so.

 

[Janichsan]

Whoah, whoah, whoah... The new episodic Hitman game was meant to be released on Mac?

Yup.

I'd say waiting until the Fall isn't very hopefull at all. I actually was under the impression that the problems had been taken care of in 10.12.3

No, they haven't. Here's a post by a Feral representative saying explicitly that 10.12.3 had virtually no changes in the graphics department, i.e. not the necessary fixes. A Steam forum post by Cyan (Obduction) after the release of 10.12.3 also still mentions severe problems that Apple/AMD have to fix.

 

[casperes1996]

No, they haven't. Here's a post by a Feral representative saying explicitly that 10.12.3 had virtually no changes in the graphics department, i.e. not the necessary fixes. A Steam forum post by Cyan (Obduction) after the release of 10.12.3 also still mentions severe problems that Apple/AMD have to fix.

Well that's utterly disappointing. Do we know yet if 12.4 is any different?

 

[wubsylol]

If you look at Metal vs DirectX, sure. You might be a little disappointed.
But if you look at Metal today vs Metal when El Capitan launched, it's a far better looking situation.

 

[jeanlain]

DX12 was game-proof on the day of release. Apple released some unfinished API...

 

[wubsylol]

Your point? You'd hope by '12' they'd have a solid release worked out.

 

[casperes1996]

Your point? You'd hope by '12' they'd have a solid release worked out.

That's not quite fair. DX12 is ground up and not comparable to DX11. However, it is relatively closely comparable to a lot of what they've done with the Xbox, so there's that

 

[jeanlain]

Yeah, and Vulkan, even though it was released after Metal, can power games like Doom. Metal still cannot render a single game that's not in Beta (except perhaps WoW, but that's not exactly cutting edge in terms of graphics), more than a year after its release on the Mac. Get your sh*t together Apple!

Granted, the issues may lie in the drivers given that (according Marksatt) most of the code used by Metal is there. So that's up to AMD, nVidia and intel. Still, the ultimate responsibility is on Apple. They're the ones who get affected by the lack of games, so they're the one who have to make sure Metal works.