macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

Binary Badger: Oct 11, 2005; Trolling Link for a decade

AlternateAccount posted:

Is it the full Sonoma I am seeing in the updater right now? No longer says beta or preview.

What OS is currently installed?

You might be seeing RC2 which is build 23A344, which so far hasn't been found to have any show stopping bugs (so far) and may wind up being the final 14.0 that Apple ships.

Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Sep 24, 2023

# ? Sep 24, 2023 18:27

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 31, 2024 03:21

Skeezy: Jul 3, 2007

Binary Badger posted:

What OS is currently installed?

You might be seeing RC2 which is build 23A344, which so far hasn't been found to have any show stopping bugs (so far) and may wind up being the final 14.0 that Apple ships.

Sonoma is out now, and yeah 23A344 is the build that went out today.

# ? Sep 26, 2023 20:32

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

Whoo, the new OS API/rules and Bartender are not playing nice. Fun little purple icons appearing and disappearing all the time depending on your setup. Additionally the v5 update also took away some trigger functionality that I enjoyed to allow for a more dynamic toolbar.

I feel for the dev as it seems its beyond their control, but bleh. Hopefully future updates of either the app or OS will help with this one way or the other.

# ? Sep 26, 2023 20:43

Binary Badger: Oct 11, 2005; Trolling Link for a decade

Somewhat related, I went to update homebrew on an older Big Sur mac, and brew gave me the following bitching:

code:


Warning: You are using macOS 11.
We (and Apple) do not provide support for this old version.
It is expected behaviour that some formulae will fail to build in this old version.
It is expected behaviour that Homebrew will be buggy and slow.
Do not create any issues about this on Homebrew's GitHub repositories.
Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated.
Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response.
Do not ask for help from Homebrew or its maintainers on social media.
You may ask for help in Homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response.
Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a pull request.
We will review it but may or may not accept it.

I get a similar bitching when I run brew upgrade on a Sonoma mac, but no showstoppers yet.

Worst that happens that the formula only installs as a Ventura build, some formulae are available in Sonoma format.

# ? Sep 26, 2023 22:50

tuyop: Sep 15, 2006; Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted; Fun Shoe

Warbird posted:

Whoo, the new OS API/rules and Bartender are not playing nice. Fun little purple icons appearing and disappearing all the time depending on your setup. Additionally the v5 update also took away some trigger functionality that I enjoyed to allow for a more dynamic toolbar.

I feel for the dev as it seems its beyond their control, but bleh. Hopefully future updates of either the app or OS will help with this one way or the other.

Thanks for the heads up, definitely going to hold back till that�s fixed

# ? Sep 27, 2023 04:30

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

Sonoma doesn't get the new ringtones and alert sounds from iOS 17, so I still can't have the same message tones on both devices :sigh:

# ? Sep 27, 2023 09:10

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

tuyop posted:

Thanks for the heads up, definitely going to hold back till that�s fixed

Per the dev they are looking to add it back but then it would be purple �your screen is being recorded� city nonstop. So running 4 on Sonoma isn�t much better. I get why Apple went this way but it is very annoying.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 12:54

Binary Badger: Oct 11, 2005; Trolling Link for a decade

TACD posted:

Sonoma doesn't get the new ringtones and alert sounds from iOS 17, so I still can't have the same message tones on both devices

Maybe just a waiting game; some MRF posters are claiming the sounds are physically there, actually in a hidden directory in Sonoma.. but actual implementation hasn't begun, likely one of those 'we are still working on a promised feature' feature.

Meanwhile, Apple released Safari 17 for Ventura and Monterey, available in software update. Big Sur users are left out in the Internet cold, though.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 15:53

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

Is there a way to bulk download the assorted system wallpaper packs? I'd like to just have all the landscape videos/pictures on hand to shuffle through but it looks like you can only do one at a time.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 15:58

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

Did Mac games really tick up since Apple Silicon? When I search for Mac native games I just get Apple Silicon results. No intel. Was Intel Mac gaming so bad you can count the native indie titles on both hands?

# ? Sep 27, 2023 18:45

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Shaocaholica posted:

Did Mac games really tick up since Apple Silicon? When I search for Mac native games I just get Apple Silicon results. No intel. Was Intel Mac gaming so bad you can count the native indie titles on both hands?

Sort of. Intel made it a whole lot easier to run through stuff like parallels and fusion, or via WINEesque translation layers, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a diminishing return for the games companies to do that work themselves. If anything, those solutions offered a more reliably long-term stable solution that Apple's own interfaces.

Meanwhile, with Apple silicon, it is often a case of �oh we already have that for iOS� I suppose we should add mouse support or something?� and again a lot of the work is already done except this time it's inside the existing publisher/developer pipeline.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 19:10

emSparkly: Nov 21, 2022; I'm open to interpretation!

Shaocaholica posted:

Did Mac games really tick up since Apple Silicon? When I search for Mac native games I just get Apple Silicon results. No intel. Was Intel Mac gaming so bad you can count the native indie titles on both hands?

There have been some fairly recent big name titles like Baldur's Gate 3 and Resident Evil VIII made available on M1 and M2 Macs. I don't see it taking off much harder unless Apple strikes some really huge deals to get more hardcore stuff on Apple Arcade or something.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 22:12

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

I don�t really notice my fans spinning up on the M2 MBP when playing BG3 as much since updating to Sonoma and this game mode business. It also stopped randomly crashing after the OS update so that�s nice.

I�m still pissed about Bartender 5 and the OS though.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 22:39

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

I'm curious to see Death Stranding graphics on Metal3 vs PS5 and how the different Mac GPU configurations scale with performance in a game like that.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 22:47

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Shaocaholica posted:

I'm curious to see Death Stranding graphics on Metal3 vs PS5 and how the different Mac GPU configurations scale with performance in a game like that.

Re:Village and No Mans Sky are...ok, but the big AAA titles really haven't been that impressive on the M1/M2 Ultras so far imo, at least relative to the size/transistor density of that monster. Part of the issue I believe is that game scaling on multi-GPU configurations is significantly more difficult than scaling in apps. So I'm very curious as well to see how DS does.

On Sonoma, yeah it's a very minor thing but drat, those lock screen/screen savers/smooth fade in to desktop are so cool.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:31

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

Part of the issue I believe is that game scaling on multi-GPU configurations is significantly more difficult than scaling in apps.

I don�t understand what you�re saying here,. Does Apple Silicon expose the different GPU cores as different GPUs and make apps/OS schedule across them? I thought the GPU core count was basically just telling you how many (hundreds of) lanes of compute you had for the GPU instruction set, like AMD APUs talk about having different �CU� counts.

If they�re exposing each core as a separate GPU to schedule work on, it seems like a pretty odd choice, but will still be much easier than in the PC/SLI case because the Apple Silicon has unified memory across the GPU cores and the big problem with SLI is memory copying. It would make the ports of BG3 and RE basically heroic miracles, though, since their engines were almost certainly not designed for distinct GPUs.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:42

Kibner: Oct 21, 2008; Acguy Supremacy

Subjunctive posted:

I don�t understand what you�re saying here,. Does Apple Silicon expose the different GPU cores as different GPUs and make apps/OS schedule across them? I thought the GPU core count was basically just telling you how many (hundreds of) lanes of compute you had for the GPU instruction set, like AMD APUs talk about having different �CU� counts.

If they�re exposing each core as a separate GPU to schedule work on, it seems like a pretty odd choice, but will still be much easier than in the PC/SLI case because the Apple Silicon has unified memory across the GPU cores and the big problem with SLI is memory copying. It would make the ports of BG3 and RE basically heroic miracles, though, since their engines were almost certainly not designed for distinct GPUs.

The Ultra and Max are two separate GPU slabs of silicon, I believe, so they encounter the SLI issue of how to coordinate them to best draw frames.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:46

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

Kibner posted:

The Ultra and Max are two separate GPU slabs of silicon, I believe, so they encounter the SLI issue of how to coordinate them to best draw frames.

Oh, right, in which case I assure you that nobody is going to try to make a AAA game scale across them at all for the sake of Apple gamers.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:48

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

Kibner posted:

The Ultra and Max are two separate GPU slabs of silicon, I believe, so they encounter the SLI issue of how to coordinate them to best draw frames.

Is that how they are exposed in the Metal API? As 2 logical GPUs? That's a bummer but not like anyone is going to be buying an Ultra for gaming but it would be interesting none the less. I guess we're back to the same problem of the 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro with 2 GPUs and no apps that could use them both?

Shaocaholica fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Sep 28, 2023

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:56

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

On Sonoma, yeah it's a very minor thing but drat, those lock screen/screen savers/smooth fade in to desktop are so cool.

They are slick as hell and the reason I�m taking a few hours to go through the trouble of downloading each of them to shuffle through. It�s also a nice touch that you can stop at different parts depending on when you unlock it. I wonder how long they spend on the curves on that slowdown.

# ? Sep 27, 2023 23:58

Kibner: Oct 21, 2008; Acguy Supremacy

fyi, I might be wrong and it may only be the Ultra that is two separate GPUs.

# ? Sep 28, 2023 00:00

Canned Sunshine: Nov 20, 2005; CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Kibner posted:

fyi, I might be wrong and it may only be the Ultra that is two separate GPUs.

Yeah, I believe it�s just the Ultra, given some restriction that was present with the Interposer. I thought I had read though that they�ve addressed it with the M2 Ultra.

# ? Sep 28, 2023 00:38

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Shaocaholica posted:

Is that how they are exposed in the Metal API? As 2 logical GPUs? That's a bummer but not like anyone is going to be buying an Ultra for gaming but it would be interesting none the less. I guess we're back to the same problem of the 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro with 2 GPUs and no apps that could use them both?

No, as I understand it they present as one. I'm saying that for game workloads though, it's more difficult for multi-die GPU configurations to get the level of scaling you'd expect like apps can. There's a benefit no doubt, but apps can get close to 100% scaling - not the case with games.

Albeit the M1/M2's Ultra interposer is very fast, so it's not like this is really comparable to SLI/Crossfire either.

SourKraut posted:

Yeah, I believe it�s just the Ultra, given some restriction that was present with the Interposer. I thought I had read though that they�ve addressed it with the M2 Ultra.

I'm pretty sure with Metal the M1 Ultra was also presented as one GPU, the basic architecture of the Ultra hasn't changed significantly with the M2 in terms of the GPU though, it's still 2 dies. The bottleneck is not necessarily the API.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Sep 28, 2023

# ? Sep 28, 2023 03:29

SweetMercifulCrap!: Jan 28, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

My initial impression with Sonoma is that my M1 iMac feels more snappy and responsive than it ever has, so so far I'm happy with it.

# ? Sep 28, 2023 05:50

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

On Sonoma, yeah it's a very minor thing but drat, those lock screen/screen savers/smooth fade in to desktop are so cool.

Extremely Apple-haver problem but I was a bit disappointed to see it just snaps back to the beginning at the end of the loop instead of doing some gentle fade / transition.

OTOH it�s really nice to see the landscape desktops return, it seemed very weird to name your OS after beautiful locations and then make the desktop background an abstract colour smear

# ? Sep 28, 2023 07:38

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

I haven't liked the landscape photo backgrounds since High Sierra.

# ? Sep 28, 2023 16:47

Deviant: Sep 26, 2003; i've forgotten all of your names.

Why would my MBP refuse to wake from sleep when i tap keys on the USB keyboard? it works when i use the on-machine keyboard, but that's inconvienent as I run it closed.

Only thing I can think is the USB hub, which is sort of a requirement for the mouse and keyboard

# ? Sep 28, 2023 17:50

The Lord Bude: May 23, 2007; ASK ME ABOUT MY SHITTY, BOUGIE INTERIOR DECORATING ADVICE

Deviant posted:

Why would my MBP refuse to wake from sleep when i tap keys on the USB keyboard? it works when i use the on-machine keyboard, but that's inconvienent as I run it closed.

Only thing I can think is the USB hub, which is sort of a requirement for the mouse and keyboard

It might not be powering the hub while in sleep mode?

# ? Sep 29, 2023 04:46

Perplx: Jun 26, 2004; Best viewed on Orgasma Plasma; Lipstick Apathy

SweetMercifulCrap! posted:

My initial impression with Sonoma is that my M1 iMac feels more snappy and responsive than it ever has, so so far I'm happy with it.

It feels like the early iPhone when they had hardcoded transition animations and slowly lowered the duration of the years.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 05:09

nexxai: Jul 17, 2002; quack quack bjork; Fun Shoe

I'm sure this is a me problem but I figured I'll ask in case I'm not the only one.

After upgrading to Sonoma, anytime my M1 Air comes out of sleep (specifically after closing the lid), it does whatever the Mac version of a Windows BSoD is by freezing, and then rebooting. I've submitted the crash reports to Apple as suggested, and it seems to mention something about the network driver (if it's important, I'll screen shot it next time).

This is really annoying, effectively having to reboot every time the lid closes.

Anyone else see anything like this?

# ? Sep 29, 2023 05:48

SweetMercifulCrap!: Jan 28, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

Perplx posted:

It feels like the early iPhone when they had hardcoded transition animations and slowly lowered the duration of the years.

Yeah. Some of them on Mac were way too drawn out for my tastes especially when windows transitions are like 3 frames long.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 06:00

BobHoward: Feb 13, 2012; The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

No, as I understand it they present as one. I'm saying that for game workloads though, it's more difficult for multi-die GPU configurations to get the level of scaling you'd expect like apps can. There's a benefit no doubt, but apps can get close to 100% scaling - not the case with games.

Albeit the M1/M2's Ultra interposer is very fast, so it's not like this is really comparable to SLI/Crossfire either.

I'm pretty sure with Metal the M1 Ultra was also presented as one GPU, the basic architecture of the Ultra hasn't changed significantly with the M2 in terms of the GPU though, it's still 2 dies. The bottleneck is not necessarily the API.

Correct - both M1 and M2 Ultra present as a single GPU to software. There is no way to even try to use them as two independent GPUs. Apple has a 2.5 TB/s interconnect linking the two chips, so the GPU's been architected to behave as a single GPU down to the hardware level. Unlike Crossfire, the whole GPU works on one frame at a time. And yes, there's scaling issues, especially on M1 Ultra. But it was the first generation of this, so that's somewhat expected.

The real issue for AAA game ports isn't unique to Ultra chips. It's that Apple GPUs use Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), AMD and Nvidia use immediate mode rendering (IMR), and a naive port of an IMR-optimized game to a TBDR GPU won't perform as well as it potentially could. It usually doesn't take massive changes to fix this, but it is extra work, and it's not necessarily easy for devs who haven't done it before to predict the scope of the project before actually trying to do it.

Which brings us to the purpose of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Despite the name, most of it is not intended (or licensed) to be used directly in finished ports of games. Instead, it's for making low-effort internal-only ports which can be put under the microscope of Apple's Metal performance tools. This is supposed to let devs invest very little time in figuring out where and how their engine's accidentally bottlenecking itself, which in turn allows them to make informed estimates of the scope and cost of doing a real native port. Basically, Apple's hoping that making it cheap to resolve uncertainty about how worthwhile it will be to do a port will result in more ports.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 11:02

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

I kinda just want to know what the M2 Ultra GPU is equivalent to when fully metal optimized. The data doesn�t really exist yet for that analysis right? Need RE8 and DS to come out for some good data points? But not that it matters realistically since the Ultra chips aren�t targeted towards gamers at all.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 16:06

Deviant: Sep 26, 2003; i've forgotten all of your names.

The Lord Bude posted:

It might not be powering the hub while in sleep mode?

it inexplicably started working, so i don't fuckin know

anyway thanks anyway

# ? Sep 29, 2023 19:53

Last Chance: Dec 31, 2004

Shaocaholica posted:

I kinda just want to know what the M2 Ultra GPU is equivalent to when fully metal optimized. The data doesn�t really exist yet for that analysis right? Need RE8 and DS to come out for some good data points? But not that it matters realistically since the Ultra chips aren�t targeted towards gamers at all.

RE8 is already out I believe

# ? Sep 29, 2023 20:00

Binary Badger: Oct 11, 2005; Trolling Link for a decade

Gives me hope for the M3 to inherit the A17 hardware RT, something tells me there are undocumented RT APIs in Ventura / Sonoma that exist since the M2 was supposed to get the RT hw but it was pulled at the last minute because the hw at the time was pulling too much power.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 21:47

Shaocaholica: Oct 29, 2002; Fig. 5E

I wonder if Metal �3� has feature parity with DX12 so there isn�t anything visually it can�t do but a modern PC/console can do for some reason.

Also Apple doesn�t seem to specify which metal version their desktop and mobile GPUs support.

# ? Sep 29, 2023 21:54

nexxai: Jul 17, 2002; quack quack bjork; Fun Shoe

nexxai posted:

I'm sure this is a me problem but I figured I'll ask in case I'm not the only one.

After upgrading to Sonoma, anytime my M1 Air comes out of sleep (specifically after closing the lid), it does whatever the Mac version of a Windows BSoD is by freezing, and then rebooting. I've submitted the crash reports to Apple as suggested, and it seems to mention something about the network driver (if it's important, I'll screen shot it next time).

This is really annoying, effectively having to reboot every time the lid closes.

Anyone else see anything like this?

Screenshot for anyone interested

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Sep 30, 2023 00:51

BobHoward: Feb 13, 2012; The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

Binary Badger posted:

Gives me hope for the M3 to inherit the A17 hardware RT, something tells me there are undocumented RT APIs in Ventura / Sonoma that exist since the M2 was supposed to get the RT hw but it was pulled at the last minute because the hw at the time was pulling too much power.

I'm very confident that hardware RT is coming in M3. If it's also a TSMC 3nm chip, it's going to be based on A17 generation CPU and GPU cores.

Apple's been doing raytracing in Metal (including API support, recently) out in the open for years. It's just that before A17, Apple's sample code and/or Metal drivers had to use programmable compute shaders to do work better handled by dedicated hardware.

I don't trust those stories about M2 and/or A16 having RT hardware pulled at the last minute. Maybe there's a sliver of truth to it, but if so, the reporting has garbled a lot.

In general, the Mac rumors 'press' loves to believe that big and dramatic last-minute things happen all the time in chip design, and that's just... not how things work, really. Chip designs get frozen (meaning: no more changes except bugfixes) a long time before any are sold to the public, probably a year or so for a big complex chip like M2. Issues like excessive power should have shown up in simulations done well before the freeze, so it's hard to imagine a problem like that as a last-minute "OH poo poo EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE NOW" surprise.

# ? Sep 30, 2023 12:00

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 31, 2024 03:21

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

nexxai posted:

Screenshot for anyone interested

Do you have a VPN or something installed that appears as a virtual network interface?

# ? Sep 30, 2023 12:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

«‹›1099 »