Thoughts on Apple Silicon?

[Jasoco]

So, what are the Löve devs consensus on the new Apple Silicon M1 based Macs and any plans on porting Löve natively to them if it already hasn't? I'd be curious to see some benchmarks between running the Intel version of Löve through Rosetta on the M1 and running a natively compiled M1 Löve version, if and when it exists. I assume some libraries will need to be ported first. I haven't really heard any talk about it here yet.

[slime]

Most talk tends to happen on the discord server. I don't have any hardware at the moment (and there is no public hardware for anyone for the next week), but I expect existing love versions will run fine with Rosetta 2. I intend to make future versions run natively but no work has been done for that currently.

Optimizations that are important on phones such as limiting the number of setCanvas calls are important on the new Apple laptop GPUs as well. A game that misuses Canvases and other GPU features will probably run much worse on TBDR architecture GPUs found in phones and the new Apple laptops, compared to on Intel/AMD/nvidia GPUs. But a properly optimized game should have comparable performance on either architecture.

[Jasoco]

What kind of Canvas misusing are we talking about. What are the limitations mobile versions of Löve have with them?

[Anuj Dada]

Most talk tends to happen on the discord server. I don't have any hardware at the moment (and there is no public hardware for anyone for the next week), but I expect existing love versions will run fine with Rosetta 2. I intend to make future versions run natively but no work has been done for that currently.

Optimizations that are important on phones such as limiting the number of setCanvas calls are important on the new Apple laptop GPUs as well. A game that misuses Canvases and other GPU features will probably run much worse on TBDR architecture GPUs found in phones and the new Apple laptops, compared to on Intel/AMD/nvidia GPUs. But a properly optimized game should have comparable performance on either architecture.

Can you tell now whether it will run or not on apple silicon?

[hanxi]

it took not much time for me to build a native version of love2d on my new macbookpro with apple's m1 chip and ran a program i wrote before to test its performance. love2d can run well on this new machine.

The test program replaces background of a face photo with user video and produces some face expression animations, for example, blinks eyes and shakes head. The FPS output on M1 is much slower than that on an even old intel cpu.

i7-4500U cpu(3GHZ): picture resolution(1920x1080): FPS 40-50 fps; picture(480x800): FPS 60 fps.
M1: picture(1920x1080): FPS 8 fps; picture(480x800): FPS 12 fps.

I suspect the performance difference is caused by too many 'setCanvas' as slime replied above, because the program has to use canvas to do image processing in realtime.