Non-AMD, but Metal actually has a [relatively] excellent debugger and general dev tooling. It's why I prefer to do all my GPU work Metal-first and then adapt/port to other systems after that: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Xcode/Metal-debugg...

I'm not like a AAA game developer or anything so I don't know how it holds up in intense 3D environments, but for my use cases it's been absolutely amazing. To the point where I recommend people who are dabbling in GPU work grab a Mac (Apple Silicon often required) since it's such a better learning and experimentation environment.

I'm sure it's linked somewhere there but in addition to traditionally debugging, you can actually emit formatted log strings from your shaders and they show up interleaved with your app logs. Absolutely bonkers.

The app I develop is GPU-powered on both Metal and OpenGL systems and I haven't been able to find anything that comes near the quality of Metal's tooling in the OpenGL world. A lot of stuff people claim is equivalent but for someone who has actively used both, I strongly feel it doesn't hold a candle to what Apple has done.

> To the point where I recommend people who are dabbling in GPU work grab a Mac (Apple Silicon often required) since it's such a better learning and experimentation environment.

I don't know, buying a ridiculously overpriced computer with the least relevant OS on it just to debug graphics code written in an API not usable anywhere else doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

For anyone who seriously does want to get into this stuff, just go with Windows (or Linux if you're tired of what Microsoft is turning Windows into, you can still write Win32 applications and just use VK for your rendering, or even DX12 but have it be translated, but then you have to debug VK code while using DX12), learn DX12 or Vulkan, use RenderDoc to help you out. It's not nearly as difficult as people make it seem.

If you've got time you can learn OpenGL (4.6) with DSA to get a bit of perspective why people might feel the lower-level APIs are tedious, but if you just want to get into graphics programming just learn DX12/VK and move on. It's a lower-level endeavor and that'll help you out in the long run anyway since you've got more control, better validation, and the drivers have less of a say in how things happen (trust me, you don't want the driver vendors to decide how things happen, especially Intel).

P.S.: I like Metal as an API; I think it's the closest any modern API got to OpenGL while still being acceptable in other ways (I think it has pretty meh API validation, though). The problem is really that they never exported the API so it's useless on the actual relevant platforms for games and real interactive graphics experiences.

My initiation into shaders was porting some graphics code from OpenGL on Windows to PS5 and Xbox, and (for your NDA and devkit fees) they give you some very nice debuggers on both platforms.

But yes, when you're stumbling around a black screen, tooling is everything. Porting bits of shader code between syntaxes is the easy bit.

Can you get better tooling on Windows if you stick to DirectX rather than OpenGL?

It's a full featured and beautifully designed experience, and when it works it's amazing. However it regularly freezes of hangs for me, and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to 'force quit' Xcode or it's just outright crashed. Also, for anything non-trivial it often refuses to profile and I have to try to write a minimal repro to get it to capture anything.

I am writing compute shaders though, where one command buffer can run for seconds repeatedly processing over a 1GB buffer, and it seems the tools are heavily geared towards graphics work where the workload per frame is much lighter. (Will all the AI focus, hopefully they'll start addressing this use-case more).

Yeah, Xcode's Metal debugger is fantastic, and Metal itself is imo a really nice API :]. For whatever reason it clicked much better for me compared to OpenGL.

Have you tried RenderDoc for the OpenGL side? Afaik that's the equivalent of Xcode's debugger for Vulkan/OpenGL.

Is your code easy to transfer to other environments? The Apple vendor lock-in is not a great place for development if the end product runs on servers, unlike using AMD Gpus which can be found on the backend. Same goes for games because most gamers either have an AMD or an Nvidia graphics card as playing on Mac is still rare, so priority should be supporting those platforms

Its probably awesome to use Metal and everything but the vendor lock-in sounds like an issue.

Same, Metal is a clean and modern API.

Is anyone here doing Metal compute shaders on iPad? Any tips?