Re: macOS metal rendering engine in mac port

[Aaron Jensen <aaronjensen@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 4:47 AM Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Mine are fairly consistent. I imagine hitting thermal would hurt
> > though and Intel macs love to do that.
>
> Yeah, I wonder if that's what's happening. I have to say that I don't
> think this Mac has ever been what I'd consider fast. My ancient first
> gen i7 absolutely wipes the floor with it in compilation speed
> despite being at least 7 years older. I guess Moores law really did
> run out of steam. ;)

I'm curious what chip you have? I have a 2.4 GHz I9-9980HK and it's
not slow to compile, but the linux machine I was using for a while
demolished it. Of course, that was a 16 core 3950X, so...

> > What isn't consistent is typing experience. There are times when it's
> > just like molasses but I can't necessarily reproduce that with
> > benchmarks. I wonder if the separate threaded IO from the mac port
> > helps make things feel more consistent in some way.
>
> Probably, the threading also seems to be used to do the buffer copies
> and things. AFAICT it also offloads the copy to Metal when it's
> enabled, although I imagine that then involves copying the buffer back
> down to system RAM from VRAM for updating, so I don't know how much of
> a win it really is. On a fast graphics card it maybe really is a big
> win.

Interesting. And generally speaking, are there licensing issues
preventing a merge/collaboration w/ the mac port?

> It's a lot of work. I'd have to be sure that the patch actually stops
> the flashing and blanking before I tried that. I'm not hopeful, tbh.

I've been using it and haven't seen any flickers. I'll continue using
it and report back. I probably would have seen one by now.

> Anyway, the last thing I want to try to improve lag is to move the
> buffer copy to as soon after the layer update as possible, so that
> when you hit a key we don't have to wait for it before we can start
> drawing. I've pushed a change to the surface-stuff branch, so can you
> please give it a go and see if there's any improvement.

Will do.