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0 pointsbanachtarski6y ago0 comments

macOS runs horribly on custom hardware, it just runs better than other commodity software.

Any application that pushes frames/performance would do better on Linux/Windows on the equivalent amount of silicon. What's missing because the hardware and drivers is so closed is the feedback loop between application/game devs and the vendors. If I have an issue with what I'm building, I can hop into a chat and immediately talk to Nvidia/AMD/Intel folks/etc. In some cases, they share code, in some cases they release a driver update. In pretty much all cases, the code I'm working on gets better. Apple lacks this feedback loop, and their drivers are garbage.

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microtonal6y ago· 3 in thread

Apple lacks this feedback loop, and their drivers are garbage.

There may be exceptions, but I never had anything like the graphics glitching that the Nouveau drivers had or known problems that would lock up Intel GPUs every one 1-2 days or consistently in some workloads [1], or broken Intel WiFi drivers. The recent Intel driver problems literally took months 4-5 months to fix, while they show-stopping errors were in an LTS kernel release that was rolled out in various distributions.

If I have an issue with what I'm building, I can hop into a chat and immediately talk to Nvidia/AMD/Intel folks/etc. In some cases, they share code, in some cases they release a driver update.

You mean like asking NVIDIA for Wayland support following the same standards as everyone else? That worked well.

Everyone's drivers are bad, but I don't believe for a second that Apple's are measurably worse than Linux or Windows drivers.

[1] https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F...

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

computerex6y ago

It goes without saying that OSX has the worst driver support out of Windows/Linux/OSX simply because OSX supports the smallest range of devices it will run on. Windows runs on hardware from a wide range of OEM's, whereas OSX only supports hardware produced by Apple. Try running a hackintosh and you'll very quickly see what I mean. Linux driver support used to be garbage but it has gotten quite good lately. User friendly distributions like Ubuntu typically work out of the box now.

microtonal6y ago

Now we have gone from macOS drivers are garbage to macOS has the worst driver support. Which is a completely different statement. Also it's one that is hard to disagree with -- macOS is only made to run on Macs.

banachtarskiOP6y ago

I'm absolutely NOT including open source drivers in my assessment. I'm specifically talking about drivers written by vendors who unsurprisingly do a better job targeting their own hardware.

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