
A First Look at Metal Performance on the iPhone 6s - shawndumas
http://flexmonkey.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-first-look-at-metal-performance-on.html
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greggman
I haven't looked at Metal's API. I have programmed PS1/PS2/PSP/PS3 which all
used command buffers completely under your own control letting you pre-create
them and removing all overhead for "Draw Calls" so I'm excited about these new
APIs that seem more like consoles.

I found this Vulkan video from Siggraph exciting

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quNsdYfWXfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quNsdYfWXfM)

There are several demos shown which demonstrate the advantages of getting rid
of the draw calls. Not only can you draw a bunch more stuff but you also get
much of your CPU back to do other things.

The showed one example doing 400k effective draw calls on some tablet which
would be impossible with the older APIs.

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anon4
I wonder if we're seeing this due to AMD's inability to write good drivers. In
certain benchmarks, the performance of cards that cost way less than nVidia's
shot up to match theirs. "If the driver is the problem, then no driver is no
problem", I guess. It's overall a very welcome development, but I have to
wonder what level of incompetence goes on at AMD to get to this point.

~~~
fr0styMatt2
That's certainly not a fair assessment. APIs like Metal & Vulkan (and AMD's
Mantle which arguably started the trend on the PC) are the correct technical
direction to go and not an indication of incompetence on AMD's part - if
anything they're an indication of trying to fix a broken status quo. You have
to understand that drivers are hard to write because they became an over-
complicated mess of hacks and impedance mismatch between what OpenGL/DirectX
of old made graphics hardware look like and what graphics hardware actually
evolved into. The hardware just evolved away from the APIs.

See here for a start -- this post is extremely enlightening on the situation:

[http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-
opinions-o...](http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-
dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019)

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melling
I've got a collection of Metal articles for anyone interested in learning it.

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=metal&age=10000](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=metal&age=10000)

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exogen
Note for anyone else sent to the ChromaTouch article instead: Blogspot's
JavaScript router is extremely broken. The actual article linked to can be
found in the left nav.

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pgtruesdell
This is really impressive, much more work went into the CPU & GPU on this "s"
generation than previous years. I can't wait to see what people, smarter than
I, do with it.

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frou_dh
Given the previous 's', the 5s, was the one to introduce both the 64bit CPU
architecture and the Metal capable GPU, you're selling it a bit short.

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pohl
Yeah, and the 4S was the first dual-core iPhone, too.

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vbezhenar
I wonder, how this compares to modern desktop-class video card on DirectX?

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ksk
I don't really understand what you mean by "this". Do you mean Metal, the API
vs Direct X. Or do you mean The video hardware on the 6s vs a desktop.

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vbezhenar
I mean particle test in linked article. iPhone 6S + Metal vs some top video
card + DirectX. Of course later wins, there's no doubt about that, I just
wonder how big the margin is.

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Jasper_
There's too many variables in that to make a meaningful comparison.

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microcolonel
I read the title and thought they were talking about the performance of the
metal materials in the frame, and not _Metal_ the API.

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cthalupa
Me too! Especially after "bendgate" the last time around.

( For those of us that ended up in here due to that, it looks like some people
have done some testing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPGzLd8Xwx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPGzLd8Xwx4)
)

