0.7.0 means absolutely no Mac games?

"MichaelNikelsky" wrote:
Macs have mediocre GPUs

"jherico" wrote:
Mine has a GeForce 750m.

Yes, that qualifies as mediocre.

"MichaelNikelsky" wrote:
and really,really bad drivers which are using a 5 year old (!!!) OpenGL version with all usefull extensions stripped away.

"jherico" wrote:

OpenGL 4.1 is not state of the art, but neither is it antiquated. Additionally, Metal and Vulkan (if it makes it to Mac) will both allow developers to get far better performance out of their hardware.

Yes, it will....maybe in the future. Let´s just hope Apple supports Vulkan and don´t insist on using their proprietary stuff. And yes, OpenGL 4.1 is not state of the art....OpenGL 4.5 is. Sure, you have to support older versions as well but it is very well possible to optimize for a newer OpenGL without breaking everything.

"MichaelNikelsky" wrote:
Even on the same hardware windows is about 2 times faster due to the much better driver quality and even more if you start to use newer, vendor specific OpenGL extensions.

"jherico" wrote:

Unlikely. Most slowness seen on the mac version of a given app versus a windows version is attributable to developers not optimizing their OpenGL paths as much as DirectX, and the fact that Windows drivers are constantly patched specifically to improve the performance of AAA games.

Not unlikely but a proven fact, something we experience everyday with our application and we are not using DirectX. With OpenGL 2 it was about 20% slower on Mac using the same code (well except for some shaderstuff that we needed to strip down because Apple didn´t support it even though the GPU was perfectly capable of it). OpenGL 4.1 gave it quite a nice performance improvement but due to the fact that we can use OpenGL 4.3 and some nvidia specific extensions (bindless graphics to be exact) we get up to 3 times the performance compared to OpenGL 4.1. And both these paths are optimized although there is still room on the extension side (NV_command_list for example) which can give use another massive performance improvement. Sure, if you are only fragment limited, it won´t give you such a big increase, but if you need to render thousands of objects inside the viewfrustum with 30 million triangles on average (in our case) you will definetly notice how bad Apples OpenGL support really is.

"jherico" wrote:

If you don't want to use a Mac (or Linux) for VR, fine, then don't buy a mac for that purpose. But stop trying to justify the idea that because you don't care about a given platform, it's incapable of serving a purpose for someone else.

Oculus recommends at minimum a GTX 970 if I am not mistaken and from my experiences this is a totally valid minimum requirement. The D700 (you can only count 1 anyways) in the Mac Pro are the only GPUs on the Mac plattform that scratch this mark, all the other GPUs on the Mac are way below this. So I can completely understand why oculus halts development of the mac stuff on concentrates on windows, which has a more than 10 times larger user base and enough hardware that is really capable of delivering a good VR experience.

Linux runs on identical hardware to Windows and that has also been dropped. So it's not valid to claim Oculus' dropping of Mac & Linux is related to hardware limitations.

It's either due to staffing shortages, or it was a condition of the Microsoft partnership.

I've been having great fun with my 5 year old mac book pro and DK2. It's only a 750M but I get 100+fps on Java OpenGL with simple scenes. And some of the best games I ever played where from the 80's ie simple graphics. So I really hope VR isnt going to be only about AAA MS gaming. Let's just hope 'on hold' isnt for much longer! I mean if you can have mobile VR, there is no reason you cant have mac or linux VR, unless it is the licensing of the daft controller bundle.

The more developers you have on board, the more chance of the killer VR app being produced. Look at iOS and Android vs MS et al.

Some of us remember the days of the kickstarter and were sold on the idea that Oculus would remain platform agnostic. I love working on my mac for building for PC and Linux, etc. The next SDK raises concerns for those of us that want platform agnostic devices. I focus my VR work on Therapy and Educational situations (not AAA games).

I would like to see Oculus at least Open source or provide a "Crash Bed" option for those of us developers that would like to keep the Oculus so that it could be used as an agnostic platforms. Some of us would be willing to maintain the code maybe not with all the features (New VR input devices you are building).

I do not wear an Apple feather in my hat, I look at devices are simply roads based on solutions. I hope the PC gamers prove to be the bet everyone is hoping for. I have my doubts they will buy the entire PC solution. I hope Oculus has a plan B if I am right. Will the mac users be there to help sales if it happens?

Preface this:
I have been doing VR and AR since 1996, I have seen many VR device dump in the gaming world over frugal gamers.

I started developing educational VR software. My intent was to use Oculus and Leap Motion. I have a nice Mac but can't afford a new gaming PC at the moment, maybe if I could have sold some education software I could have invested. While software will need to run on PCs for secondary (read: poorly funded) school systems, students and faculty in community colleges and universities have a large Mac contingent. It sounds like Oculus has decided to support the gaming industry only, which is predominantly (although not exclusively) PC based.

I can't see any sense in wasting any more time or money on the Oculus, since I'm not developing gaming software, but as a long shot, while I look for a different VR platform to use, is there any way to run PC developed VR apps on Mac OS X efficiently? Parallels just really doesn't work well for any PC app I've tried using on it. Up till now I wasn't too concerned with needing to worry about PC specific apps or development and was more interested in my own stuff than downloading games.

I have been looking at mobile apps, too, and I may look into seeing how the GearVR might work in an educational setting, but right now I'm pissed enough about dropping Mac support that I don't want anything to do with it.

"jamieyello" wrote:
...Krabby Patties that cost $100 come with a really nice atmosphere.

I love Mr Crabs.

"MichaelAnthony" wrote:
is there any way to run PC developed VR apps on Mac OS X efficiently? Parallels just really doesn't work well for any PC app I've tried using on it.

Easiest way is to just boot camp it. Works fine.
(Well, most mac owners have imacs or macbooks and those run mobile gpus below the oculus recommended gpu, so "fine" might not be the best word there. I'm surrounded by imacs at work, I've used VR on them)