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by sitharus 3879 days ago
Drivers. On MacOS they tend to be a bit behind the Windows versions, also MacOS itself is reasonably GPU-heavy. Add to that Apple's tendency to lag behind the latest (as in from the last five years) OpenGL standards and you've got a recipe for slow OpenGL.

Though interesting that it's an Iris Pro, MacOS used to have the best Intel drivers as Apple pulled them in-house. ATI and NVidia have always treated MacOS as a secondary target.
3 comments
reidrac 3879 days ago
That doesn't sound completely right.

If it was a 10% performance hit, I could blame the driver but comparing 60 FPS (I presume) with 1 FPS when people are playing the game in Mac OS X using WINE; that sounds like something is probably not quite right in his code.

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hellofunk 3879 days ago
Here's a table of specific OpenGL support for various versions of OSX:

https://developer.apple.com/opengl/capabilities/

To say that there is a recipe for slow OpenGL on Mac is a bit misleading: Mac is capable of fantastic OpenGL projects.

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Kristine1975 3879 days ago
>also MacOS itself is reasonably GPU-heavy

OS X's window manager is optimized for fullscreen windows on top of everything else (including menu bar and the "Dock"): https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Graphi...

I also found that even with a GPU-heavy fullscreen application, having another (smaller) window on top doesn't noticibly degrade rendering performance. It seems the window manager is doing some clever things there in regards to compositing.

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