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After watching the WWDC and seeing how Adobe expects to improve performance by using Metal, I was curious if Serif is currently using it or if it is planning to?

 

AD is already pretty performant, but if I could squeeze more battery life when I'm away from the wall, I would be much obliged :)

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Affinity apps are not currently using Metal as it's only available to OS X El Capitan and iOS 8 & 9. Hopefully a developer will comment and explain why we don't need to use Metal as our app is quicker without it ;)

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If you rely only on Metal, you have to probably drop support for machines not supporting it GPU wise (Radeon HD 7000, Intel HD4000, GTX 4xx and up are supported, meaning that Imacs and Macbooks pre 2012 won't be supported). No idea if the Affinity team have the dev ressources to handle two versions, or if it can be added optionally.

 

One of the many great things about AD and AP is that its very usable on old Macs, and i suspect that old machines are quite common in the community. According to devs who have tried El Capitan, older Macs (e.g. late 2008 MB) still work great with it though, no idea how Apple is handling this, because El Capitan is supposed to rely on it (Metal). It seems that they have a fallback option for it, for machines only supporting OpenGL.

 

Adobe might phase out support for older Macs not supporting Metal soon, and affected users might switch to Affinity software. On the other hand, going with the tide and supporting new Apple tech might have promotional benefits on the appstore etc., because it would promote Apples own goals moving forward. Tough software politic decisions to make..

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@MBd: sorry, I did not see your post, it is practically the same question.

 

@Str2:

I have an older MBP with an i7/6490M and I don't really notice any performance issues (or need to upgrade), except the graphics are lacking at times compared to other laptops.  If using Metal means that older Macs wouldn't be supported, I hope they don't shift too soon.  I could see a reason for them to migrate towards it, but the current version works on a lot of older models.

 

@Leigh:

I don't see how the current App would be any quicker or more performant without it.  The whole point of Metal is to remove some of the middle layer in order to make a better use of resources, resulting in a more efficient application.

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The answer for now, until Andy and Matt have a look into it, is that we'll use it if possible and appropriate.  Porting existing code to use Metal will require considerable work.

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
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