Geometry Shader on Mac?

[Neto_Kokku]

@nasos_333

Hi, is there any update on this ?

Can i use Geometry shaders on Mac now without any issue or downgrade of rendering ?

If not would be strange, i have used Geometry shaders and have incredible capabilities that make other systems look years behind especially in ease of use, so not having them supported in the hardware level means Macs have suddenly become a no go for me, not even by a billion miles close. Also geometry shaders are really fast.

Here is an example of the system i work on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsBbrh1Xyb4

Thanks

There was not and there will not be any updates. Geometry shaders will not work on Mac (or iOS). It was explicitly not part of the Metal API specification and Apple decided to not even implement it on their GPUs.

Geometry shaders are a dead-end tech, specially after the advent of mesh shaders. They are only “very fast” on mid-range and high-end PC GPUs, and any effect using them can be made more efficiently using compute shaders and indirect instanced rendering. This is specially true on gen8 consoles (PS4/XB1/NSW).

Geometry shaders are just still popular among Unity developers because they are easy to write using surface shaders, but other engines abandoned them several years ago.