Developer relations?

How many of your issues have you raised directly w/DTS?

Hi, my app, Fractal Architect, has been a showcase for the immense power of Metal/OpenCL/CUDA GPU compute shaders

for the last 10 years on MacOS and the app's render engine is in use on Windows as well (OpenCL/CUDA). The app is now in Beta on iOS/iPadOS with Metal as well.

So I know exactly what you are going through.

Apple's infamous "Wall of Secrecy" means that I have never had an internal contact inside of Apple.

I have been directly contacted by AMD, but their hands are tied with their working relationship with Apple.

Oddly enough, my testing partner for Fractal Architect, is Lennart Ostman from Harnosand, Sweden. It is a small, small world.

I am in the USA. I see that your company is based out of Sweden.

Observations:

The pattern on Mac OS is that Metal/OpenCL is stable for 2-3 years, followed by 6-9 months of driver ****. This pattern has repeated several times.

Metal is far better supported on iOS/iPadOS. My app's large and very complex compute shaders ported easily to iOS 12/13.

I was really surprised by how robust Metal has been on iOS.

Catalina has been frankly extremely buggy. But for my app Metal on Catalina has not been problematic. I did have to workaround a couple of serious Catalina OpenCL/Metal bugs.

My app also uses classic vertex and fragment shaders on both Metal and OpenGL. I am using them for both 2D and 3D model visualization.

We should make contact off this forum. We might be able to help each other out.

Indeed, we are based in Sweden!

Before we switched to Metal we had a fair amount of issues with OpenGL as well, but I don't think we used to be able to kernel panic the entire OS, it usually just resulted in glitches / undefined behaviour.

I'll drop you a mail off-forum!

To the OP, can you post the IDs of the showstopper issues?

Hi,

Mathias here, graphics programmer at Capture.

FB7432403 is our most important showstopper right now, internal errors on newer Intel GPUs, and we don’t have any workarounds for this.

FB7466370 - Driver hangs/crashes, or even kernel panics on AMD hardware. (I have a sketchy workaround, but we keep triggering it when adding new features.)

FB6101284, internal error on GeForce GPUs identified by a customer. (Haven’t heard anything since I reported it in May.)

Also, FB6344520 is not a complete showstopper but will prevent us from launching a new feature on AMD hardware in the near future, unless I can find workarounds for it. (And just as I verified if this had been fixed yet or not I found a similar issue on Intel GPUs that I need to report.)

Has there been any progress on any of these issues? We haven't heard anything.

I just downloaded the "Modern Rendering with Metal" sample and ran it on my 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro with 10.15.1.

Kernel panic..
EDIT: Retested on 10.15.2. Still kernel panicing.
EDIT: I have filed a TSI for this now.

EDIT: Apple have closed and reimbursed the TSI, saying there's no workaround.