Metal

[eighteentee]

Hi all,

A quick question... I'm running Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo on a Mac Pro 2010 with nVidia Quadro 4000 2gb GFX card on High Sierra 10.13.2 and cannot seem to get the 'metal' option under Performance to work - it's greyed-out. I've checked System Profiler and the report states Metal is supported. Interestingly, it works fine on my Macbook Pro Retina 15in (2012). Is this a bug?

[Lee D]

Hi eighteentee,

Welcome to the forums.

The Metal feature is only enabled for Intel HD and Intel Iris integrated GPUs found in the more recent Macs, this is why it is greyed out. If it's available on your Macbook Pro, check which graphics card is installed.

[R C-R]

43 minutes ago, Lee D said:

The Metal feature is only enabled for Intel HD and Intel Iris integrated GPUs found in the more recent Macs, this is why it is greyed out.

I am probably misunderstanding something about this but I use a "(Late 2012)" 27 inch iMac (model Identifier: iMac13,2). The GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M, which is obviously not an integrated Intel GPU of any kind. System Information says that Metal is supported.

 

However, in AD or AP I can select Metal & even tick the "Use only integrated GPU" box without either app preventing me from doing so:

What am I missing?

[eighteentee]

20 hours ago, Lee D said:

Hi eighteentee,

Welcome to the forums.

The Metal feature is only enabled for Intel HD and Intel Iris integrated GPUs found in the more recent Macs, this is why it is greyed out. If it's available on your Macbook Pro, check which graphics card is installed.

 

Is there a technical reason for this? It seems quite a narrow selection of graphics cards to work with...

[affinitynumpty]

I’m interested in this as well.

 

I have a Radeon Sapphire HD 7970 Mac and an AMD Radeon HD 7870 unflashed both support Metal on the OS (El Cap, Sierra and High Sierra) but both have the Metal greyed out in Affinity Photo.

 

They are quite powerful GPU’s.