Is Unity going to support GPU accelerated raytracing for Apple hardware?
+1 hopefully
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Sure, maybe 1 year too late.
Better late than never
I was searching for raytracing after seeing this video, as raytracing is needed to have feature parity with the console and pc
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Macs with GPUs capable of raytracing are such a rare thing I bet the engineers at Unity even forgot Metal got support for it.
I doubt this will come or atleast not very soon. The market is just too small. They have a lot of other priorities. Raytracing on Windows is not even out of Preview and DirectX12 development is also lacking behind. They are too busy.
I think its quite interesting to have raytracing on next years ios/tvos/macos/ipadios
The chips will be ready soon, I hope it won’t take long before the software will take advantage of it.
It would be interesting to know how the change to ARM CPUs will affect games on Macs. Or in the future, all Macs will generally be considered low-end devices. Normal business applications or graphics applications with GPU support can still run, but games are at a different level.
Probably it won’t change so much. If you go for Apple, you have to pay a lot to get decent hardware for high-end gaming.
At the moment, the iMac Pro costs over 5000$. For this price, I could buy two high-end PCs with newest Nvidia RTX plus a PS5. The market share of people who would instead waste their money is probably low. And the people who care about high-end gaming will know it better and stick to Windows Gaming (maybe also with AMD cards) or stick to the new consoles.
The bulk of the Macs in the wild are laptops with integrated graphics and high end games rarely get Mac ports as it is. Heck, Rocket League dropped Mac support alongside with Linux a while ago because the tiny userbase wasn’t worth the time spent maintaining those builds.
Finally, Unity performance on ARM CPUs isn’t great and it’s still bad at using multiple cores unless you go full DOTS, so it will depend a lot on how good single threaded performance is on these new chipsets. Unity’s CPU warts show up pretty quickly on anything that isn’t an Intel or modern Ryzen with lots of L2 cache (PS4, XB1, Switch, mobile phones).
I would be very surprised if Apple added actual hardware ray tracing support to their own GPUs.
What basically bothers me about Apple is that they do a lot of things that Microsoft used to do and were criticized by everyone, but apparently everything is fine with Apple. Sometime it was mentioned that in the long run they only want to allow Metal on all Macs.
In the long run? OpenGL is pretty much deprecated on Macs already and there is no native Vulkan support.
Yes, Apple only wants its own API on Macs and doesn’t allow anything else. Something that Microsoft never did in its worst time.
Hey anyone hear anything new about this?
Macs do have (outdated) OpenGL, but they do not have Vulkan, because Apple is in a forever legal dispute with Khronos Group. Can’t very well implement something when it goes against your legal interests. Also, let’s not forget that Metal was devised and released well in advance of Vulkan being drafted and finalized. Sure, Mantle may have existed to some degree prior, but only had one GPU vendor supporting it, and therefore it wasn’t the most interesting direct to hardware API to support. Some of Mantle did make it into both Vulkan and DirectX 12, design wise, but those were still released some time after Metal first launched.
Sure, Microsoft never excluded either OpenGL or Vulkan, but they did make DirectX 12, and their consoles require games to use that as well. And nobody else supports DirectX 12, except by use of reverse engineered wrapping layers, such as VKD3D.
Alas, the price was paid for being first to market: Nobody else wants to support your API on their platform, either because licensing forbids it, or because you don’t want to encourage developers to also support the competitor’s platform.