Apple's Metal seems to get high praises from everyone, so, there may be hope that they can implement Vulkan well too.

https://developer.apple.com/metal/ [developer.apple.com]

Thanks Edward, will try it out.

I would like to point out that the new build, 14.346, does work on my MacMini with some tweaking to preferences. The problem seems to lie in some of the new viewport features that were added to Houdini 14. If you turn them off in the Preferences and in the Display dialog you get a fairly stable Houdini on OSX. At least as stable as Houdini typically is. I, of course, still get crashes on Windows as well.

Metal is currently only for iOS, but it'll be interesting to see whether Apple decides to support Metal in OSX or Vulkan in the future (or both?).

The improvement I'm most excited about is that Vulkan requires a standalone GLSL to bytecode compiler, so we can precompile all shaders at build time rather than having the client's driver do the compilation. Currently we test compile all shaders here, but the final GLSL compile is done by the client driver. New drivers can introduce compiler problems making it difficult to stay ahead of this. Because the bytecode compiler does all the complicated language parsing, it should resolve a lot of these issues. I'm crossing my fingers that a new GL 4.6 might allow for bytecode shader support as well. But as Apple is far behind AMD and Nvidia in their GL version support, even the addition of this feature probably won't help OSX for a while.

I'M on the verge of buying a mac pro..but after reading this post and a lot of other posts all over adobe and black magic forums..its getting more and more difficult ..it upsets me because all my programs are on mac OS X i also edit in fcpx..and use pro res codecs all the time for final renders. Can someone who has a mac pro( please list your configurations) tell me the problems they,re running into when rendering and working in houdini 13/14. It would help me make an informed decision on whether to purchase the trashcan or not. Thanks
i'm looking at an 8 core d700 64g

I'M on the verge of buying a mac pro..

Related: Modo 901 was released today, touting a brand new ‘Clear’ viewport and the reports are all sounding kind of familiar; Nvidia Windows setups are killing it whilst Trashcan Mac has issues including restarts, weird viewport flashes and colours:

'Topic - 901 and Advanced Viewport on Mac Pro'
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=34&t=109082 [community.thefoundry.co.uk]

… bit like a slow-motion train wreck.

MartybNz

I'M on the verge of buying a mac pro..

Related: Modo 901 was released today, touting a brand new ‘Clear’ viewport and the reports are all sounding kind of familiar; Nvidia Windows setups are killing it whilst Trashcan Mac has issues including restarts, weird viewport flashes and colours:

'Topic - 901 and Advanced Viewport on Mac Pro'
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=34&t=109082 [community.thefoundry.co.uk]

… bit like a slow-motion train wreck.

i spoke to apple today about all these problems going on with the trash can and OS X .He basically in not so many words said if i can…wait for the new OS X that's coming in October, it's based more on stabilty than features..also he hinted at a mac pro refresh as well.. take this with a grain of salt at least when it comes to the mac pro refresh..hopefully in the last 2 years apple will work on their OS X and open CL/GL.. plus graphics card driver issues

As a OS X user, I must say that someone must be nuts to give so much $ for MacPro. For that amount of money I can buy 2x same competing power.. And than you have HUGE number of problems with OpenGL…. Especially for Houdini users, I think that Linux is best option.

SreckoM
As a OS X user, I must say that someone must be nuts to give so much $ for MacPro. For that amount of money I can buy 2x same competing power.. And than you have HUGE number of problems with OpenGL…. Especially for Houdini users, I think that Linux is best option.

I'm not familiar with Linux ..does Fcpx and pro res codecs work on that platform. Also what are the issues that Houdini users are having with open GL ..I've heard of viewport issues ..but what about rendering. How bad is the issues with working inside Houdini?

Get the pitchforks ready for WWDC

Wed 10th 11:00 AM 2:30 PM
Graphics, Games, and Media Lab D
OpenGL and OpenGL ES Lab

Graphics and Games
Meet with members of the OpenGL and OpenGL ES engineering teams to dig deeper into features, tools, and performance. Bring your code and your questions.

I am betting it's about IOS graphics and not desktop/pro graphics

Bifurcation doesn't bode well for cross-platform apps; OsX 10.11 is now going Metal… Appears that for Houdini, Windows/Linux have won the next few years!

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/08/apple-introduces-metal-for-mac-promises-huge-leap-in-graphics-performance [appleinsider.com]

Metal ………..

Yup , bye bye OSX on my mac book , hello windows 10

rob

From that website:

Metal for Mac works almost identically to its iOS counterpart, as developers can stack on apps on core animation and core graphics, as well as built-in OpenGL and OpenCL API support.

Sounds like OpenGL is there. What's the panic?

Andy58
Sounds like OpenGL is there. What's the panic?

And that's what people are afraid off.

Apple invests in Metal. OpenGL will be even less priority now. SESI will not use metal for the same reason why they are not using DirectX. Houdini on Mac will still have shitty viewport problems.

Circle is closed.

Exactly. OpenGL is already crappy on OS X and probably will not be touched by Apple anymore. So it is move to Metal or just stop developing for OSX. I do not see why anyone would develop for OpenGl on OS X after this …. Crap

Does the H14 viewport support a legacy GL 2.1 mode?
It might almost make sense to have both a “legacy” and “Metal/D3D” viewport. So there is a fallback for rough patches and for customers without bleeding edge hardware.

My biggest concern is if it is years until we see widespread adoption of “Metal”? There are lots of issues with openGL and CL in OSX right now with the current hardware and current OS, so like others have said, I worry this is more justification and distraction to ignore the current state of the openGL and openCL drivers. So in reality this just means its even longer till OSX users see the same performance WIN users see with GL and D3D.

Metal == Apple's DirectX.. which I'm not sure how awesome v 1.0 was, but v12 is close.

Kfinla
… It might almost make sense to have both a “legacy” and “Metal/D3D” viewport…

I would love to see DirectX viewport in Houdini.

“Metal for Mac works almost identically to its iOS counterpart, as developers can stack on apps on core animation and core graphics, as well as built-in OpenGL and OpenCL API support. While the most obvious use of Metal is for games, Adobe found huge improvements by stacking After Effects and Illustrator on Metal.”
[appleinsider.com]

So now that Metal is gaining momentum with Apple developers, and OGL will not be upgraded for future macOS's as a result of Metal's growing popularity; it appears that SideFX/Houdini will need to decide their future direction for the Mac platform very soon.

I find it very intense and stressful for SideFX to struggle with the fading OGL support on macOS but feel very optimistic regarding Houdini's future support of Metal because of all of its benefits that Houdini can now take advantage of. Its exciting to hear about other game developers, 3D & 2D software developers discovering greater performance when transitioning their software to Apple Metal.

Interesting bits from a Chris Lattner interview. This may be not relevant currently but might reveal some of the issues with OsX OpenGL

Chris Lattner: I think the first year in production was in the OpenGL stack which ended up shipping in a late software update for Tiger (10.4) as well as in Leopard (10.5). There it was used in a completely invisible way to basically repack data and upload it to the GPU, so when you're making OpenGL calls to, say, glVertex3f(), or whatever the low-level GL call is, those vertices need to be transformed into a very specific data format the GPU can understand and you have a whole bunch of different kinds of calls that can be used to produce vertex or other geometry data. But you also have a matrix of different kinds of GPUs you need to support and they all have different formats and different capabilities and requirements, so LLVM was used to generate very small chunks of code to do that. It was part of the 64-bit bring-up in the Leopard timeframe. That was probably the first completely invisible use of it that used and proved a lot of the code-generation technologies.

John Siracusa: Forgive me, one more LLVM-related thing because we're going to go from what is a compiler all the way down to nitty-gritty stuff here. My vague recollection of what you just described, the whole video-driver thing, was that there were files on disk in the shipping OS that were basically LLVM bytecode, like these little BC files, and they would get slurped up and converted to machine code appropriate for the GPU. Am I right about that?

Chris Lattner: Yeah. You're absolutely right. Basically, the way to look at it is the code files, the LLVM that shipped with the OS, were little snippets of code that then at runtime, were recombined and optimized across. That was kind of the library of primitives that the OpenGL runtime used to assemble what it was trying to do.

http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript [atp.fm]

Forgetting the OpenGL discussion Artye. The Accidental Tech podcast is a fave of mine and I had no idea that the transcript was available. I don't get much time for podcasts these days, and I've seriously cut back on the number of Apple related RSS feeds I subscribe too (too many fanboys not enough objective fans). But John, Marco and Casey can always be relied upon for an objective view.

Having a transcript is so much more useful to scan through for specific nitbits of interest (for me anyway).

And yeah OpenGL on OS X is as bad as it's ever been!

EDIT
My initial excitement got the better of me. It seems transcripts are only for certain occasions (probably when something is going to ‘print’). Oh well, headphones on train journeys it remains then…