OS X Metal support?

Has the Unity team been playing with OS X Metal? Any word on when we end users will see it?

 

Seeing UE4 running on OS X Metal was great news. They listed the following partners and Unity3D was among them:



Would also be curious to know what state it's in and when we can hope to see it.

 

I wonder if they'll actually make the Editor to run in Metal on 10.11 as well as the standalone player?

 

They also claimed 10X better performance on draw calls. This is actually my first time hearing about this software. It sounds amazing. Just how powerful would this make an integrated graphics card? Actually getting good frame rates on lower end macs sounds nice. Why arn't more of us talking about this?

 

It looks like Metal is where Apple wants to go. Vulkan, and probably any future version of OpenGL, are basically dead for Mac and iOS.

 

This is the same performance gains that Vulkan/Mantle/DirectX12 are claiming. The tricky thing is that integrated cards are often not CPU limited but GPU limited. The draw call performance improvements are for cpu overhead. It does not improve the GPU's fill rate, memory bandwidth, or other GPU limitations.

 

Mantle's dead. It's API was absorbed into Vulkan.

 

I can say that running Unity code on a modern iOS device with Metal did give me about an 8x performance boost.
I'm very excited to see where this goes for OSX, and curious to see what Shader Model it will support.
Please keep us up to date on this Unity!

 

Like Richard said, we are working on this.
We expect to have some preview builds later this summer. Stay tuned.
Editor running on Metal is on our roadmap, but player support will come first.

 

Any updates on this? I just installed El Capitan, and I'd love to start working on something here.

 

Are Metal & Vulkan going to wind on being the same thing? Or is Metal Apple's version of DirectX?

 

Looks like there is an implementation available in the 5.3 beta. I haven't tested it out yet, but sources seem to indicate performance is generally worse than OpenGL currently.

Metal and Vulkan are not the same thing. The end goal of all of the new graphics APIs are similar, give more control over the GPU to the developer. Looking at Metal as Apple's DirectX is actually an OK way to think about it. Just like DirectX is only available on Microsoft products, Metal is only available on Apple products. Vulkan is designed to be a multi-platform API that will work on all platforms (except Apple's ecosystem). This may change in the future, but I think OS X is going with Metal as their primary graphics rendering API.

 

Public preview of OSX Metal can be found here:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-metal-seed-for-os-x-10-11-preview-build-3.356754/

 

Hi,

are there any estimations on when metal will be available in the editor? I am writing a native plugin, which uses metal kernel and rendering functionality, which works fine on ios. but for development, this also has to run on OS X, and i am having troubles mixing metal and OpenGL rendering.
An estimation would help us a lot in planning our next steps.

Thanks!

 

It's under development, but won't be ready for preview earlier than in timeframe of Unity 5.5.

 

Any news on Metal? I'm on Yosemite. Is it worth moving to El Capitan for Unity3D Metal support? As it would be the only reason for me to do the upgrade.