Godot 4 on macOS and Apple Silicon

EnrikeChurin

Will Godot 4 work on macOS? It seems like MoltenVK will be used to support Mac, but how reliable and performant is it? Does Godot 3.x and 4 work on Apple Silicon Macs? Is all of the functionality available on them?

TwistedTwigleg

Welcome to the forums @EnrikeChurin!

Godot 3.3, I believe, works with MacOS and Apple Silicon. For Godot 4.0, I think it will work fine with Apple Silicon as the MoltenVK is just to convert from Vulkan to Metal, which is just the graphics library and Metal is supported on both Intel and Apple Silicon based Mac computers.

Not sure on the performance or reliability though, but I haven't heard of too many issues with Godot 3.x and Apple silicon, so I think it probably works fine there. For Godot 4.0, I think its a little too early to say as its still very actively in development.

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Calinou

Godot 4.0 will work on macOS thanks to MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan to Metal. If you test the current development builds, it might not work reliably because it's not actively tested, but eventually it will be fixed.

Apple Silicon is already supported on Godot 3.3, and will continue to work in 4.0.

dotted

@Calinou A couple of months ago I switched to 4 to try it out, muddled around a bit to build it but the build product did not work correctly. Rendering was broken (a black screen). The main issue was Vulkan support both in building and running. My box is a MacBook air running Mojave. All the drivers for Metal are current.

Has there been much work with Molten support since then?

Calinou

@dotted said: Has there been much work with Molten support since then?

Not really, since we don't have contributors knowledgeable with rendering using macOS and bruvzg is busy with other things. Fixes will likely land once alpha/beta stage is reached.

dotted

@Calinou ok thanks!

richard-kain

Being concerned for such support is reasonable, but ultimately not too much to be worried about. Godot is built on very cross-platform friendly libraries, and doesn't use or rely on any proprietary code. While Apple's proprietary architecture is quite new, it is still just a different architecture. Godot's core can be adapted to run on it, and almost certainly will be in time.

When it comes to porting, it really is just a matter of how interested the community is in a particular platform. An open-source project like Godot can theoretically be compiled for ANY platform. How hard the community will work to get it on a particular platform depends on the interest (sometimes commercial) in the given platform. For the new Apple architecture, you likely don't need to worry. Apple is an extremely large platform holder, with an extremely profitable and accessible App store. There's going to be TONS of motivation for the community to insure that Godot gets compiled for these new chips.