Displacement & Tesselation on Mac

Hello,

I would like to know if tesselation and displacement are still not supported on mac and why?
As I know Mac supports OpenGL 4.1 already long time.

Thank you.

Within UE4 support for and usage of shaders is gated within the Shader Model 5 feature set. This also requires support for Compute and either increased sampler units or separate sampler/texture binding amongst other things, that OpenGL 4.1 does not provide. Consequently we can’t currently support SM5 on Mac OS X, hence why there’s been no support for on the Mac, even though Apple’s OpenGL claims to support it.

I have previously tried to decouple from other aspects of Shader Model 5 in order to test Apple’s OpenGL support, discovering several bugs in some of the GPU drivers provided by OS X. As far as I am aware there is at least one issue still remaining that prevents compatibility with UE4’s support.

Hello,

Thank you very much for this detailed response. I have only one more question. Did you test this with new Mac El Capitan? Did you try to contact Apple?

Thanks.

The last test was conducted against an earlier El Capitan Developer Preview and all bugs discovered against Apple’s OpenGL are always filed in Apple’s BugReporter/Radar.

Update I’ve just retested again on El Capitan 10.11.0 and some cards still don’t render tessellated geometry correctly and I’ve followed that up with the appropriate parties.

Checking in, how’s displacement on macs these days?

Same question. Will be supported with metal?

I won’t be adding support to Mac OpenGL - but Apple did announce a form of will be added in Metal on their next OS revisions and used UE4 to demo it: WWDC16 - Videos - Apple Developer

As this is a major new feature in Metal and works in a very different manner to on other platforms we don’t intend for this to be supported in our Metal code until later this year.

Hi,
today 4.13 has been released claiming Shader Model 5 on Mac using Metal…
does it mean it’s using Metal tesselation on Mac if used with osx 10.12 sierra?
if not I asume if Metal tesselation it’s coming this year will be with Unreal 4.14 release as there are no more time for a 4.15 release in 2016, right?

UE4 4.13 supports Shader Model 5 features for Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan where the Metal API does not support tessellation, so there’s still no support on Mac in 4.13.

After macOS 10.12 Sierra is available later this year, we will add support in a future engine release. I can’t promise exactly which release at this time but the intent is to get it out this year if possible.

bump, how is this “issue” comming along… will we have tesselation on 4.15 running osx sierra?

support for Metal is part of UE4 4.15 as stated in the release notes. It does require changing the Metal Shader Version for UE4 to target to v1.2 in the Mac section of your project settings as the shaders must be compiled with Metal features only available in macOS 10.12 Sierra. This makes the Metal Shader Model 5 platform incompatible with Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, which must then use Metal Shader Model 4.

Thanks , I just spent the last few hours upgrading my project to 4.15 and I saw the option is now available, just rendering 15,000 shaders lol and tommorow I Will test it out but it should be working as I read abother post mentioning it… you guys are the best

Thank you so so much for the update and telling us about it!

update, worked on my end…