How complete is the Metal video driver right now? And who knows, maybe even backwards compatibility with Metal 1 could arrive. The developer who has added Metal 2 support to RetroArch has already indicated he intends to bring this over to iOS and tvOS as well. We are now ready for a future when Apple will outright kill OpenGL support, while at the same time we have ensured that we have one common set of shaders that can be used across all these video drivers.
We therefore are very close to having a universal shader specification that will work on all the major platforms. Thanks to Hans-Kristian Arntzen’s SPIRV-Cross middleware, we can reuse the same shaders across Direct3D/Vulkan/Metal. This includes Khronos’ Vulkan API (added to RetroArch since 2016), Microsoft’s Direct3D 11/12 (added to RetroArch since earlier this year), and now Apple’s Metal 2 for macOS.
With the release of RetroArch 1.7.4, we have achieved an important milestone: we now have fully functioning graphics drivers for the three major next-generation graphics APIs. There is no longer the potential for one single graphics API to cater to all platforms. While we regret this industry wide push away from a standardized, cross-platform graphics API, we have been forced to move with the times and instead cater to all the major graphics APIs. It has since some years ago made the switch to macOS as well, and this year the API has been bumped to version 2.Īpple has announced OpenGL will be deprecated in the future, its graphics driver stuck with the dated OpenGL 4.1 spec for years now. This API is called Metal, and was first premiered with iOS 7 and Apple A7 devices. However, since 2014, there has been an industry-wide push towards lower-level APIs, and Apple in specific decided to go with its own proprietary graphics API.
Up until the ’10s, Mac OS X has relied on the crossplatform OpenGL API to provide hardware accelerated rendering to developers writing Mac applications. Here is a compatibility list of all supported hardware: Some important things you should know about Metal 2 – not all of the devices that can run macOS 10.13 necessarily support this. Get it by going to our Downloads page, and click on the download link below macOS High Sierra (or later). If you have relatively modern Mac and you want to enjoy the latest in cutting edge technology, you should definitely try out this latest version. For this version, we default to the Metal video driver by default.
This version requires at least macOS 10.13 (High Sierra), a fairly modern version of macOS.
You should have at least Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard) installed in order for this version to work.