Author: mike

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Seeing huge performance gains after implementing Seasonality’s Particle Mode in a Metal compute kernel. Able to simulate 12x the number of particles at 3 times the frame rate, using less than half the CPU.

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I just released a new app…this is my first game and it’s called Tower Mixup. If you like puzzle-style games, this one’s for you. I developed it using SwiftUI over the last two weeks. Check it out and let me know what you think…I’m releasing it for free with ads.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tower-mixup/id1565219152

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What an amazing game! I thought they were going to double OT for sure… UCLA has been so fun to watch during this tournament and Gonzaga had to dig deep to pull this one off. Let’s see if they can wrap up a perfect season in the Championship game.

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And today, I’m working on converting thousands of lines of OpenGL code to Metal. Decided to write a Renderer abstraction layer that supports both frameworks to make a smooth transition. Goal is to get it done by the end of this month.

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I just posted a video about purchasing an EOS R. While originally intending to jump to the R5, I just couldn’t justify purchasing one at this point. But then I realized the EOS R is actually a really great choice right now, and works well as a bridge camera for my switch to the RF camera system. I talk about some of my thought process here…

Direct YouTube Link

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The memory bandwidth on the new Macs is impressive. Benchmarks peg it at around 60GB/sec—about 3x faster than a 16″ MBP. Since the M1 CPU only has 16GB of RAM, it can replace the entire contents of RAM 4 times every second. Think about that…

Some say we’re moving into a phase where we don’t need as much RAM, simply because as SSDs get faster there is less of a bottleneck for swap. Indeed, SSDs have made significant strides, especially with the newest Samsung 980 NVMe drives pushing 5-7GB/sec. This is closer to the memory bandwidth than we’ve ever been with consumer-grade hardware, and you’re only running about a third of the speed of main memory in a 16″ MBP.  However, with the huge jump in performance on the M1, the SSD is back to being an order of magnitude slower than main memory.

So we’re left with the question: will SSD performance increase faster than memory bandwidth? And at what point does the SSD to RAM speed ratio become irrelevant?

Theoretically, SSD swap is “fast enough” if it can load data from a backgrounded app into main memory before the user notices a delay when clicking an icon in their Dock. Once this threshold is reached, there’s not much of a distinction between an app being open or not.

I do believe that a limited amount of RAM is becoming less of an issue as time goes on. As I’m writing this, I’m 5GB into swap on my 16″ MacBook Pro with 32GB of memory. In years past, a Mac 5GB into swap would have felt like it was crawling. However, today I haven’t noticed a single hiccup, and honestly wouldn’t even be aware of the swap usage if XRG wasn’t sitting on my desktop telling me so.

Would I buy a Mac with 16GB of RAM to use as a primary development machine today? No, probably not. While I don’t typically notice a speed decrease due to swap usage, I don’t think that storage threshold has been reached quite yet. However, I’m looking forward to Apple’s answer to the higher-end market and am confident they have M-series chips with more RAM in the pipeline.

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It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a year since we visited Papua New Guinea. I’ve been thinking about creating this short film ever since. A couple of months ago, after deciding I had procrastinated long enough, I got started on the project. Here’s the final result: my story of our visit to Normanby Island…a day I’ll never forget.

Direct link: https://youtu.be/2RKk7viZpjs

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Impressed with the responsiveness to Apple radars lately.

I reported two bugs with SwiftUI on Big Sur in the last few months, and both issues have already been fixed.

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Blows my mind that you can buy a 16TB disk for just over $300 these days. The internal mechanism is a 7200 RPM enterprise class Exos X16 to boot.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1558328-REG/seagate_steb16000400_16tb_expansion_desktop_usb.html