It would be nice if the Mac version of Pinball Arcade had the newer lighting effects of DirectX11 mode in the Windows version. With the advent of METAL on OSX and potentially higher performance, it begs the question of whether the METAL API for Mac could handle the lightning effects of DirectX11. OS X has been notoriously slow on updating OpenGL to newer versions, but I'm not sure of the state of the Metal API. Given it's used in one form or the other in iOS as well, I'm guessing it cannot handle it as one would expect the iOS version to have better lightning when it's possible given how many iPhones are out there or is a matter of only the newer phones having enough GPU capability?
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Does METAL contain abilities of DirectX 11 for Pinball Arcade?
- Thread starter MagnumXL
- Start date
superballs
Active member
- Apr 12, 2012
- 2,654
- 2
This would be cool. Are you a Cedar Point fan by chance?
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Jay
Member
- May 19, 2012
- 478
- 3
From what I've read, Metal is more akin to Direct3D. You can read more about it here:
https://developer.apple.com/metal/
Metal does have a lighting component to it which has to be specifically coded into the game. Since Metal works on both iOS and Mac, optimized games should perform nearly identically on either platform.
However, the key to all this is that the developers must implement the Metal code. I'm not sure how Farsight has approached this, but I think anyone can tell that TPA on iOS and Mac is a pale imitation of how it looks and performs on Xbox, Playstation and Windows. I know it could look as good on Mac; the question is whether Farsight wants to invest the programming resources to make it happen.
https://developer.apple.com/metal/
Metal does have a lighting component to it which has to be specifically coded into the game. Since Metal works on both iOS and Mac, optimized games should perform nearly identically on either platform.
However, the key to all this is that the developers must implement the Metal code. I'm not sure how Farsight has approached this, but I think anyone can tell that TPA on iOS and Mac is a pale imitation of how it looks and performs on Xbox, Playstation and Windows. I know it could look as good on Mac; the question is whether Farsight wants to invest the programming resources to make it happen.