Tests with Unity, Substance Designer, Parallels Desktop, and Lightworks video editor found no problems with the driver. My frame rate on the OpenGL benchmarks went up by about 35% with the new driver. The good news, though, was the benchmarks. The version is still basically 4.1, but with 15% implementation of the 4.2 API extensions.
#APPLE METAL GPU DRIVERS#
I didn't really expect to, but I thought maybe some of the OpenGL was embedded into the GPU drivers on a Mac (I'm a programmer but not in the graphics pipeline, so forgive my ignorance of that part of things).
#APPLE METAL GPU DRIVER#
The bad news is that the new driver did not change the OpenGL support. Then I installed the latest driver from NVIDIA, and repeated the tests. I installed an OpenGL diagnostic tool on my system yesterday and profiled and benchmarked the default El Capitan drivers. Apparently Apple is going all-in for their own Metal, a competing proprietary offering that they think is the answer to DirectX. 15%) implementation of the 4.2 API extensions. Apple, unfortunately, seems stubbornly stuck at OpenGL 4.1 with a slight (c. The developer says this needs OpenGL 4.3.
#APPLE METAL GPU UPGRADE#
I'm using an asset whose upcoming major upgrade can run on just the CPU (and in fact multithreads there) but runs much better if it can offload computation to the GPU.
#APPLE METAL GPU PRO#
But with the M2 slated to appear in the 2022 MacBook Air, we’ll likely need to wait till then to find out.I run Unity on a Macbook Pro Retina (2013 edition, NVIDIA GeForce 650M GPU). Right now, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip inside is only capable of games on low settings, so any huge performance increase would be a boon for the dozens of gamers daily driving Apple products. That being said, I’d love to be proven wrong when the Apple M2 actually appears, because that means that gamers will actually have another option to play games on. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that an integrated GPU in a power sipping processor will be able to match the performance of a dedicated graphics cards that take up to 250W to run.
Besides, the way iCaveDave got to that conclusion is also problematic, as there’s no way to tell just exactly how much of an improvement the M2 GPU will be without actually any benchmark numbers. Ever since MacOS Mojave, there hasn’t been new drivers for NVIDIA GPUs. The problem with that though is that NVIDIA graphics cards don’t actually support the Apple-developed Metal graphics API. The NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti meanwhile scored 30,597 points in the same benchmark. He then applied the performance difference from there to the Apple M1’s GPU benchmark scores in Geekbench Metal, and thus came to the conclusion that the Apple M2 GPU is capable of 30,085 points. See, iCaveDave appears to have come to that conclusion by taking the leaked Apple A15 Bionic GPU benchmarks from earlier this week and extrapolated the performance increase from the A14 Bionic to the leaked A15 Bionic chip’s scores. So how could an integrated GPU meant to go in a power-efficient chip be capable of such performance? Short answer: it’s probably not.
Now the GTX 1080 Ti may be from 2017, but it’s still a beast of a graphics card, with similar performance to something like the RTX 2070 Super or sometimes even close to the RTX 2080 Super depending on the game. According to the YouTuber iCaveDave, the Apple M2’s integrated graphics will be as powerful as the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti. Here’s where the tin foil hats start appearing. PDUWB0p2R4- iCaveDave – David Eden-Sangwell September 6, 2021 Just going to put it out there now, the M2 (not M1X) will have GPU performance from it’s integrated GPU that’s about in line with a GTX 1080ti.