Assasin’s Creed Shadows coming to the Mac day 1.

diamond.g said:
You think they just ran the code through the shader converter and called it a day? I recall seeing somewhere that the PC version running through crossover gets about the same performance as the native version (or it isn't any better).
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Not necessarily, but maybe for some of the shaders; Definitely not all. I mean they have MetalFX for upscaling not FSR so they do have Mac specific implementations. It also uses Apple's GameController framework, and there's a Mac specific credits scene and such so there are indications that they tried to put in some effort. But keeping the shader functions named the same might've just kept things simpler for re-using shared engine code even if the implementation inside the shader functions are different. I don't know, hard to tell with the info available so far
 
So I really want a Metal Frame Capture which I still can't seem to get, but here's an Instruments Metal System Trace from a second of the benchmark - I've never been too good at reading these but if anyone wants a peek, here it is. - While processing the trace I had a working memory set of 200GB sooo it took a while for Instruments to analyse on my 48GB machine :P

Apparently 16.2MB is too large for the site, so it can (at least for a while) be downloaded here:


Looks something like this in broad strokes:

1742733599060.png


But way more to explore in the linked file
 
casperes1996 said:
So I really want a Metal Frame Capture which I still can't seem to get, but here's an Instruments Metal System Trace from a second of the benchmark - I've never been too good at reading these but if anyone wants a peek, here it is. - While processing the trace I had a working memory set of 200GB sooo it took a while for Instruments to analyse on my 48GB machine :P

Apparently 16.2MB is too large for the site, so it can (at least for a while) be downloaded here:


Looks something like this in broad strokes:

View attachment 34321

But way more to explore in the linked file
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I wish this was something I had the knowledge to help with in all honesty. I wonder if it’s something @leman would be able to analyze?
 
Got a frame capture. Unfortunately MTLReplay can't deal with traces this big in full profiling mode, but still, got a frame capture from the benchmark
Screenshot 2025-03-23 at 4.21.23 PM.png


I'll start looking at and doing whatever analysis I can - but I have very little Metal experience so it may be limited, but here's the gputrace file if others want a peak (you can of course also take a trace yourself - In Xcode, select. debugging the app, set the environment variable "MTL_CAPTURE_ENABLED=1", enable metal frame capture in options, select the M in the debug bar and set a shortcut like cmd+F1, run the benchmark and hit your shortcut - then wait an absolute eternity. At some point Xcode will trick you into thinking there's a problem by saying "No GPU Workload Detected"; Ignore and let it continue to run - eventually it'll beachball. Leave it for a while, then the MTLReplay pops up. Game remains beach balled forever so just kill the process when you're done with it.

Once again the archive is way too big for the website so download is here:

I will say this though, the trace looks extremely odd to the point that I don't really trust it. The thumbnail for the present frame looks wonky and the performance counters all suggest 0% occupancy on all blocks. Occupancy may be because it's in Lite mode, but you'd think the render steps could still be pictured correctly
 
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casperes1996 said:
Got a frame capture. Unfortunately MTLReplay can't deal with traces this big in full profiling mode, but still, got a frame capture from the benchmark
View attachment 34328

I'll start looking at and doing whatever analysis I can - but I have very little Metal experience so it may be limited, but here's the gputrace file if others want a peak (you can of course also take a trace yourself - In Xcode, select. debugging the app, set the environment variable "MTL_CAPTURE_ENABLED=1", enable metal frame capture in options, select the M in the debug bar and set a shortcut like cmd+F1, run the benchmark and hit your shortcut - then wait an absolute eternity. At some point Xcode will trick you into thinking there's a problem by saying "No GPU Workload Detected"; Ignore and let it continue to run - eventually it'll beachball. Leave it for a while, then the MTLReplay pops up. Game remains beach balled forever so just kill the process when you're done with it.

Once again the archive is way too big for the website so download is here:

I will say this though, the trace looks extremely odd to the point that I don't really trust it. The thumbnail for the present frame looks wonky and the performance counters all suggest 0% occupancy on all blocks. Occupancy may be because it's in Lite mode, but you'd think the render steps could still be pictured correctly
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Wow. 12 gigs. Is it literally taking a snapshot of all gpu instructions?
 
Jimmyjames said:
Wow. 12 gigs. Is it literally taking a snapshot of all gpu instructions?
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Yeah; It's supposed to capture everything the GPU was asked to do to render a frame. With all of the command buffers, compute work, texturing work - You should be able to re-render a frame from it, but there's something weird and wrong with it
Final render is off, intermediate renders don't make sense (at least not the ones I looked at), performance counters seem missing

It provides some info (of dubious trustworthiness given the issues) but all the info it usually would provide seems broken - I've never taken a capture of such a complex scene and maybe these are just limitations of the "Lite" mode, but I would think the render thumbnails would still be accurate, which they just are not
 
casperes1996 said:
Yeah; It's supposed to capture everything the GPU was asked to do to render a frame. With all of the command buffers, compute work, texturing work - You should be able to re-render a frame from it, but there's something weird and wrong with it
Final render is off, intermediate renders don't make sense (at least not the ones I looked at), performance counters seem missing

It provides some info (of dubious trustworthiness given the issues) but all the info it usually would provide seems broken - I've never taken a capture of such a complex scene and maybe these are just limitations of the "Lite" mode, but I would think the render thumbnails would still be accurate, which they just are not
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Very interesting thanks. How do you find the stability of Xcode for this kind of work? I have heard mixed things about it and when I tried to open the frame capture, it crashed.
 
Jimmyjames said:
Very interesting thanks. How do you find the stability of Xcode for this kind of work? I have heard mixed things about it and when I tried to open the frame capture, it crashed.
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Xcode is really stable lately. Only crashes on days that end with a y. You can also consistently crash it by writing too fast in an interface builder property that takes an image. That’s a been a consistent crash since at least 16.0 and I think earlier too.
 
casperes1996 said:
Xcode is really stable lately. Only crashes on days that end with a y. You can also consistently crash it by writing too fast in an interface builder property that takes an image. That’s a been a consistent crash since at least 16.0 and I think earlier too.
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Adding to this; Today is the second time this has happened to me - The LLDB that ships with Xcode got into a broken state, where every time it hits a breakpoint, it segfaults. Solution, download a new Xcode Beta and run that instead. Then eventually that'll probably break too and I just hope there's a new Xcode beta to download by then...(if anyone know of another way of fixing it do let me know
 
dada_dave said:
I have never bought an Assassins Creed game and have no time to play but feel the sudden urge to buy the newest game ...



(Elon is complaining about the game being "woke" btw)
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Suddenly I feel it was worth every penny!

Quinn Nelson just released Mac gaming video. In it he mentioned that the DualSense touchpad can be used for mouse control. What? Is this correct? I have never managed to get that working. Can anyone confirm this?
 
Jimmyjames said:
Suddenly I feel it was worth every penny!

Quinn Nelson just released Mac gaming video. In it he mentioned that the DualSense touchpad can be used for mouse control. What? Is this correct? I have never managed to get that working. Can anyone confirm this?
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Yep. I’ve used that before. Iirc you need to hold the PS Button while using it. Or maybe that was for using the thumb stick. Or for a different machine. In any case I’ve definitely tried it before :P
 
casperes1996 said:
Yep. I’ve used that before. Iirc you need to hold the PS Button while using it. Or maybe that was for using the thumb stick. Or for a different machine. In any case I’ve definitely tried it before :P
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I’ll have to try that. There are options for the touchpad in settings, but they didn’t seem to make any difference.

Edit. This didn’t work unfortunately. The quest for touchpad control continues.
 
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Jimmyjames said:
I’ll have to try that. There are options for the touchpad in settings, but they didn’t seem to make any difference. Edit. This didn’t work unfortunately. The quest for touchpad control continues.
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Am once again back by my Mac, and unfortunately it seems I was remembering a different system - perhaps Steam in Big Picture mode? It doesn't seem I can control the mouse with the trackpad n'or thumb stick


Also, AC Shadows update; 115GB for me too
 
casperes1996 said:
Am once again back by my Mac, and unfortunately it seems I was remembering a different system - perhaps Steam in Big Picture mode? It doesn't seem I can control the mouse with the trackpad n'or thumb stick


Also, AC Shadows update; 115GB for me too
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Thanks for checking. I thought I tried big picture mode, but maybe I need to adjust some settings within Steam. It’s weird that settings has options for the touchpad, but none seem to make a difference. I asked Quinn and will post it here if I get an answer. I might also file a feedback with Apple.
 
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