Editor's note: The furor about why Apple is deprecating OpenGL has flared up again with the release of Mojave. This piece originally ran in June, but remains accurate and relevant todayApple's list of Mac hardware supporting the new macOS Mojave is identical to its list of. More specifically, Metal is Apple's hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and compute framework, standard library and GPU shading language.Mojave will require at least a Late 2012 iMac or Mac mini, or a Mid 2012 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. It also of course runs on any new 2017 iMac Pro or new Retina MacBooks (released in 2015), and supports all of the black cylinder Mac Pros (released since 2013). It also supports the earlier 'cheese grater' Mac Pro models back to Mid 2010, if equipped with a Metal-capable graphics card. Why Mojave requires a Metal-capable GPULack of support for Metal graphics is why some of the Macs that are supported in today's macOS High Sierra can't be upgraded to run Mojave.
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This includes 2009-2011 ('non slim') iMacs; 2010-2011 Mac minis; 2009-2010 plastic non-Retina MacBooks; and 2011 or earlier non-Retina MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models.The new Mojave drops support for a couple years of non-Retina models, but still supports some non-Retina Macs, as the problem isn't their display resolution but rather their GPU capabilities. Older Mac Pro models dating back to 2010 can be outfitted with new Metal-capable GPUs to run the new release, making it clear Apple isn't just dropping legacy machines to force new purchases.Drawing a line at Metal-capable GPUs allows Apple to optimize graphics performance-particularly for entirely new software features including multi-user FaceTime and other new iOS-familiar UI features. If you've owned a Mac for 8-9 years, Mojave offers a good reason to upgrade your hardware and join the modern Metal party.The new Mojave release will officially ship this fall alongside a new iOS 12, watchOS 5 and the new tvOS, following what has been Apple's regular schedule for OS updates for several years now. In advance of this, Apple is offering a program where users can opt in to download prerelease software, test out its new features in advance and report any bugs they discover to Apple.Metal replaces OpenGLMetal was first delivered in 2014 for the previous year's iPhone 5s to of the graphics capabilities of its custom A7 'System on a Chip,' which bundled a 64-bit CPU and independent GPU. The performance gains from Metal come largely from its optimizations to reduce CPU load, enabling software to much more efficiently make use of the power of the GPU. Developing the State of the Art in mobile GPUs was an expensive and risky proposition that had pushed one-time mobile GPU giants AMD, Texas Instruments and Nvidia.Apple's goal for iOS was to build extremely high performance graphics capable of rapidly ratcheting up performance and then just as rapidly scaling it down to conserve battery life. It needed the ability to optimize support for upcoming products-notably the higher resolutions of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and future models of iPad that would demand more graphics power than most PC laptops had.Android and Windows licensees had far less ambitious plans.
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There are a few ways to profile Chromium and Blink. The OpenGL Profiler for OSX allows real-time inspection of the top GL. (Event Tracing for Windows) for visualizing low-level GPU, driver and kernel interactions in a time-based viewer. Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Profiler is system profiling software for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers. Snapdragon Profiler allows developers to analyze CPU, GPU, DSP., memory, power, thermal, and network data, so they can find and fix performance bottlenecks. GPU APIs: OpenGL ES 3.1, Open CL 2.1, and Vulkan 1.0.
Samsung introduced new high resolution panels but shipped these with basic GPUs running standard Android software.
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