Metal and Mac OS X - Game Performance

Veolan·6/8/2015, 5:46:21 PM·9 votes·8,614 views

Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail in games and other apps.

Apple just announced Metal for Mac, which is supposed to increase gaming performance. Not sure if it will directly work with League or make a difference but if it does any plans on bringing this to League? :)

Update:

This is definitely exiting for any of the player base on Mac as I think this could really boost performance.

Here's another link on Metal, not too much information on it yet. http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/08/apple-announces-metal-for-os-x/

Another link from Apple: https://developer.apple.com/metal/

Update 2:

Here's a link that shows which Macs are going to be able to work with Metal! Unfortunately it looks like not all Macs that can run El Captain can run Metal, that might cause some issues and push back development if any with Metal and League.

26 Comments

Mountain Warden6/24/2015, 4:14:24 AM3 votes

Thanks Veolan for pointing me to your thread. I think it's definitely worth while for Riot to at least consider this technology if they are going to seriously support the Mac LoL client. I have to say it's still not clear to me how the whole Metal API works. Some information seems to indicate that applications need to be recoded to take advantage of it. Other information including Apple's own keynote at WWDC 2015 suggests it's a drop in replacement for OpenGL. Really wish a developer with some knowledge of this would step in and clarify how Metal is implemented to take advantage of it.

dmilin6/9/2015, 6:13:27 AM2 votes

It seems like some of you don't completely understand what Metal is. It won't magically make every app and game on your Mac suddenly be able to run on higher settings after updating to El Capitan. It's an API library which developers can use to optimize their apps and games. This means that a developer has to manually go and change their code in order for the game to use Metal. I'm a registered Apple Developer, but personally haven't used Metal as I've been out of the dev scene for a while now. However, I believe that it is no easy process to convert a game to work with Metal. It would require a major code rewrite in how objects are displayed on screen. As the Mac client seems to be a second thought for Riot, I wouldn't hold your breath hoping Metal will be available for LoL any time soon. I'd love to see it happen though as I can't run League at anything above medium high on my 4 year old MBPro right now.

Rootworth6/9/2015, 3:48:28 AM2 votes

Interesting...

amaranthian sky6/8/2015, 7:07:59 PM2 votes

About to post this myself. Guess you beat me to it :D

Parceval6/9/2015, 4:23:35 PM1 votes

I'd love to add some noise to this.

I'd really like to see Riot invest more in optimizing the overhead cost of running this game.

They do SO MANY things unbelievably well, from organizing events to supporting the community to the art, and more. However, the quality of the program itself often feels lacking. Higher bug rates, messier code structure, etc.

The percentage of gamers on macs continues to rise, especially as other games begin to optimize their content for this platform. It would be very unfortunate if Riot didn't invest the time to reconfigure the code for Mac (instead of their current solution of essentially simulating a PC, which requires immense overhead and is actually more efficient to just dual boot a PC OS, and run regular LoL over the top of the second OS).

Come Riot, we love you! But we'd also love to see this implemented soon.

Veolan6/16/2015, 2:50:18 AM1 votes

Any devs able to jump in and say a word? Would love to hear your feedback even if it's only about Metal and doesn't pertain to any plans of moving to Metal for League :)

amaranthian sky6/21/2015, 5:10:53 PM1 votes

Well given the current state of the mac client, bugs galore, lag, glitches, i dont think they will support OSX for too much longer.

Veolan6/24/2015, 12:39:09 AM1 votes

Updated with a new link on compatibility.

Mountain Warden6/24/2015, 4:23:27 AM1 votes

As another comment, Khronos Group is also developing software called Vulcan which is intended to replace OpenGL. Vulcan is suppose to be similar to Metal in the sense that it gives developers more direct access to the hardware with less overhead than old OpenGL. Vulcan is planned to be cross platform in the same way that OpenGL is which might make sense to save on developer time to use that API instead of Metal. I'd prefer a Metal implementation since it's developed by Apple for the Apple operating system. But I'd take Vulcan if they decided to go that route.

Mountain Warden7/10/2015, 4:23:25 AM1 votes

Just installed the El Capitan public beta. I will report on the performance once I've tested it a bit.

Mountain Warden7/11/2015, 10:42:23 PM1 votes

Well I've been playing a lot of leagues these past two days and my initial round of testing results are inconclusive. I've been monitoring the FPS in the top corner and I'd say they are higher than they use to be back in Yosemite. However, based on my own subjective perception, the game seems to run about the same as before. So I don't know if there is a glitch with FPS reporting in leagues, but the game is about as smooth (or choppy depending on how you look at it) as it was in Yosemite despite higher FPS. I'd like to see how other people feel about this. Maybe I'm just crazy lol

Mountain Warden7/13/2015, 8:15:40 PM1 votes

Glad to have validation of my impressions on the performance.

Mountain Warden5/16/2016, 8:27:58 PM1 votes

Well El Capitan has been out for the better part of a year now and there hasn't been any announcement from Riot concerning Metal. I think they simply won't support it since Macs are a super small piece of the pie. I'll keep playing leagues since I love the game so much, but it's disappointing that potentially higher FPS are right around the corner yet so far away... Amumu

amaranthian sky6/9/2015, 2:32:33 AM1 votes

Im surprised there isn't more buzz. I'll call my cousin tomorrow. He is an Apple dev might be able to explain whether it is automatically implemented or developer-dependant.

tuxedobob6/9/2015, 3:50:45 AM1 votes

Would League even get anything out of it?

Well, I guess since they updated SR it would. That kinda killed framerates, but even a 5 year old comp at 2560x1440 plays decently with decent settings.

Ulquiorra9956/9/2015, 4:14:07 AM1 votes

Considering how most of the games are beyond poorly optimized for Mac (some games I can run perfectly on high settings under Windows, but they stutter even on low in Mac ports), I'm very pleased to see this.