OS X WWDC announcements related to games

[jeanlain]

So openGL is deprecated. It's not exactly new, but now it's official.
I'm more interested in the new Metal features. On paper at least, it looks like Metal is getting a nice update on both iOS ans macOS.
The feature set tables have not been updated yet, but here is what they showed (I find the new logo awful):

Sorry for the low contrast, it's how they showed it.
The "GPU-driven command encoding" looks interesting.
I'm quite curious about "Async compute". Is this the stuff that's been discussed at length on the Windows side, and which AMD manages better than nVidia? It does seem to bring interesting performance benefits there.

And what about the "Multi GPU queue synchronisation"? Would it allow using multiple GPUs for rendering (a game)?

Anyone knowledgeable wishing to comment?

 

[marksatt]

GPU Encoding is very interesting and allows the GPU to generate draw commands into render passes preconfigured by the CPU. This lets you do GPU based culling and other transformations. There have been many experiments along these lines on the current consoles that expose similar but lower level functionality available on their fixed hardware. It will take a while for this to be used fully and I expect it will cause many hard to debug crashes!

Async compute formalises the way to use compute in parallel with rendering and is just the same feature as on other AMD platforms IIRC.

Multi GPU queue synchronisation is primarily for eGPU used for pro apps, rather than games. It solves the problem of having one GPU wait on another so that the “producer” GPU is finished before the “consumer” GPU starts. It doesn’t solve Metal not supporting direct GPU->GPU resource transfer - instead everything goes through system memory and requires CPU coordination which is typically too slow for games.