It’s not unusual for features of graphics APIs to be limited by the hardware rather than software; especially Metal which is a very low-level API that more-or-less directly exposes the capabilities of the GPU. Since Apple switched to an in-house GPU architecture for the M1, it’s not surprising that there are some features Apple’s GPU supports that AMD/Nvidia cards don’t. For instance, Apple’s tile-based-deferred-rendering pipeline allows fragment shaders to easily read back the previously color of a pixel in order to implement custom blending effects — an operation that would be prohibitively expensive on other GPUs.
My point is, everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff) or switching to fallback version of said affects.
Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware
> everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff)
Isn’t that effectively what they’re doing here? They’re not taking away anything that people are using now - just saying that, for example, you aren’t getting the new ability to copy text out of images which is a cool feature but not a game changer or something anyone has existing habits around.
It seems far less of a gripe than, say, when they required GPUs capable of running a desktop compositor or dropped 32-bit support.
Oh yeah, Apple are relentless in their push for new platforms and abandoning old stuff. Maybe too much in the Metal sphere of things where there have been some big changes - Metal 1, Metal 2 their "modern" platform they we're pushing for starting at A12 and really now from A14-M1 and the future.
"Perform as intended" would imply an intention, which is what GP is talking about. Low fidelity is a reality of rendering on older devices. Apple should intend to render on them.
Certain features will obviously not work across devices but that is an artifact of the big change in device architecture.
The mentality that you're suggesting is akin to saying (for example) that desktops won't be supported on any display smaller than a given Retina resolution. That would be anti-consumer and totally unacceptable.
Hypothetically, the suggestion from Apple that they would stop supporting features on laptops that are currently for sale because they are "fallback" devices would be the height of arrogance and would piss off a lot of smart people who have each spent thousands and thousands on Apple devices over the past decade.
