External GPU Support for Mac and Apple also Selling Its Own VR Dev Kit in the market
External GPU Support : Aside from declaring macOS High Sierra, Apple in WWDC 2017 shown the new Metal 2 graphics API that the company claims will make code run 10x faster versus last-gen Metal. Also, Metal for VR was announced as well. There are sampler arrays , indirect argument buffers, and driver optimisations.
To drive home Apple’s commitment to founders, the business said that Metal 2 will encourage the Steam VR SDK as well as Unity and Unreal Engine. Combined with GPU support, it means you need to be able to utilize HTC Vive on the Mac.
Does this mean Apple’s hardware will work with everything on your Steam library as well as it does on a Windows PC? Not really. But it’s a statement of intent. Combined with attention on creators, it could have enough to provide Oculus and Microsoft cause for concern.
“That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will take action,” Oculus creator Palmer Luckey said this past year. He went on to clarify the meaning behind his statement and said it’s down to how Apple doesn’t provide high-end GPUs in its computers, which is essential to running the Oculus Rift VR platform.
So like they used to for some time back in the day should they prioritise higher-end GPUs, we’d really like to encourage Mac. But right now, there is just not a single machine out there that supports it.”
What’s more, Metal will now support external images via a Thunderbolt port with the Metal 2 programmer kit that ships with the recently announced AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU.
