Do Macs get SM5 when the new fancy Metal is used?

[anonymous_user_2b10dd13]

@vito_BumpingWorkshop;383530

As far as I can see, a lot of restrictions, especially in materials, on Macs are results of the lack of SM5. I googled and there’s no specific info about this. Does anyone know?

AFAIK Metal is a separate API. That is, no more OpenGL, Mantle, DirectX, ShaderModel, etc. when using the Metal API.

The Apple Metal documentation is here:

Metal Overview - Apple Developer

Metal-Shading-Language-Specification.pdf

It appears for 2015-2020+ for iOS and OS X Unity and Unreal will have to focus on output to Metal and NOT OpenGL or DirectX… so as to get maximum performance (and features) on those platforms.

Luckily for us, the “headache” is on the Unity and Unreal engine developers.

So for UE4 looks like the target APIs will be:

iOS + OSX - Metal.
Android - OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan.
Windows - DirectX.
Consoles, Linux - As accordingly.

BTW, this article says Apple may “destroy” OpenGL: Metal: Apple may destroy OpenGL and boost DirectX 12 - Developer Tech News …Which IMO is a bit premature since Android will carry the OpenGL torch for quite some time and over the next several years Android will attempt to transition from OpenGL to Vulkan.