Legacy Non-metal Gpus And Macos Big Sur
Violetta Wagganer
First post so I'm sorry for making any newbie mistakes. Anyways, I've been trying to get into ML and I wanted to follow a course on it but it requires Tensorflow and I've been trying to get that working on my system. I have the 2021 14" 16GB Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro Chip and I am running Ventura 13.1. I have been following
Is this on the latest wheels with tensorflow-macos==2.11 and tensorflow-metal==0.7.0? In that case this most probably has to do with recent changes on tensorflow side for version 2.11 where a new optimizer API has been implemented where a default JIT compilation flag is set ( -new-in-tensorflow-211.html). This is forcing the optimizer op to take an XLA path that the pluggable architecture has not implemented yet causing the inelegant crash as it cannot fall back to supported operations. Currently the workaround is to use the older API for optimizers that was used up to TF 2.10 by exporting it from the .legacy folder of optimizers. So more concretely by using Adam optimizer as an example one should change:
This should restore previous behavior while the XLA path support is being worked on. Let me know if this solves the issue for you! And if not could you let us know which tf-macos and tf-metal versions you are seeing this and a script I can use to reproduce the issue?
From the help of the above reply, I managed to get it working without having to add .legacy tensorflow.keras.optimizers! By running pip install tensorflow-macos==2.10 and pip install tensorflow-metal==0.6 I can now run the code from the tutorials. Thanks for the help!
I used to play Warcraft 3 TFT on my MacBook Pro late 2013. It is a quite old notbook but its performance outranged the demand of Wc3:TFT by far. I even used to play it on an older MacBook (that famous white cased one).
your best chance is getting a windows pc with intel cpu and nvidia gpu. it took blizzard several months to fix modern radeon gpu performance on windows. now you come around with a 7 years old macbook while wc3 isnt being developed anymore. this is basically on legacy support. if it doesnt run now, it probably never will - if its not a problem with your machine.
Metal API support was added in 2015 and only to models that are 2012 and older. As such your model does technically support metal, but it is unlikely to support it optimally, especially with respect to newer features and optimizations given its age that a recent released game will likely use.
Legacy versions of Warcraft III running on MacOS used OpenGL. This is no longer an option for developers to use as Apple has discontinued support for OpenGL on MacOS and will eventually remove it entirely. In order to assure long term compatibility the Reforged development team had no choice but to migrate the MacOS build to use Metal and likely optimized around modern Apple hardware. It may not be as optimized for older Apple devices where Metal support was added retrospectively and as such there could be a large performance regression.
Many people have reported the silly situation where booting their Mac into Windows allows Warcraft III to either run on systems older than 2012 (which do not support Metal so cannot run Warcraft III for MacOS) or to run Warcraft III better than when running the MacOS build.
blizzard has a history of mainly optimizing for intel / nvidia, which also became very apparent in wc3 reforged when amd gpus were basically broken for months - from the start of the closed beta in october until the 2nd patch after release somewhere around may i believe.
but if the TO wants to look into a general gaming machine, a ryzen system surely is the way to go - it however compromises on wc3 reforged performance. but honestly, how much do you really want to invest in reforged when the game itself isnt worth the money for most.
That was most likely due to typical AMD GPU driver bugs. Unlikely to do with specific optimizations. Given AMDs GPU offerings at the time it seemed like they did not care much about them. I hope this is an area they improve with RDNA2.
As far as I am aware no Intel CPU specific optimizations were used. If anything Zen3 stands a good chance of running Warcraft III and all Blizzard games faster than any Intel current offering under reasonable conditions.
shows that intel is the easy choice over ryzen if you want a machine specifically for wc3, because wc3 surely isnt ryzen ccx aware and will happily jump from one thread to another; physical or logical - on my cpu it switched through all 24 threads constantly - no better way to get all the inter ccx latency on a regular basis. performance on my system even after the patch was not great for the hardware im running - it was quite ridiculous to be honest.
Thread migration has nothing to do with CCX awareness, it is caused by the OS scheduler. If you are using the latest AGESA and chipset drivers with latest Windows 10 then on a Zen2 or newer processor you should observe that the heavy threads hop around 2-3 cores, usually in the same CCX, very reliably.
thank you for the detailed replies. I appreciate it. Sure, my MacBook Pro is kind of an old machine. But it works perfectly on most other tasks. I do mostly publishing and some media editing for our little business here. Therefore it is still good and pretty fast.
Support does not necessarily mean run well. A good example of this is the modern Doom games which will run on older Nvidia cards like the GeForce 600 series but will do so extremely poorly, to the point a far weaker more modern GPU out does it purely because it runs the newer APIs used more efficiently. A slightly weaker card from AMD from a similar time frame has double the frame rate, purely because it runs the APIs used by that game more efficiently.
It is quite likely Metal is no exception to this, with more modern Apple systems running certain features of it more efficiently than older models even if on paper GPU power looks quite similar. However there might be other issues at play here (see below).
Assuming this is the PTR for Warcraft III Reforged, which uses Metal API, and not some legacy PTR build which uses OpenGL then a possible explanation could be incorrect GPU usage. The Macbook Pro models usually come with 2 GPUs, Intel integrated GPU and an AMD discrete GPU. In the past some people have reported that Warcraft III Reforged incorrectly uses the weak Intel integrated GPU rather than the powerful discrete GPU which will result in extremely poor performance. Since the PTR build is technically another application, the operating system may decide for some reason that it should run with the discrete graphics despite it choosing to run the proper game incorrectly with the integrated graphics.
If these performance regressions are recent (since updating to macOS Big Sur) then it is possible that is related. Some people have reported large performance regressions in some Blizzard games after updating to macOS Big Sur, where the day before on macOS Catalina the games were running perfectly.
you could buy windows 10 and install that. that could help. as for amd gpu drivers being messed up: that is not always fixed. machines wired for war for example is super glitchy even today when run on amd gpus. it will only work well on nvidia gpus. warcraft 3 is the other way around. back when it was released, it often failed to run at all on my nvidia gpu but, it had no problems running on my ati gpu. amd gpus is therefore not a problem.
Apparently this is done in the energy saver section of system preferences. The option is to turn off automatic graphic switching so as to force the use of the discrete GPU. This might cause the system to use more power when running on battery, in which case it should be set back when battery life is required and playing Warcraft III is not.
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