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Comment by TheNewAndy | Hacker News Reader

You are correct. It is frustrating because clearly it can be hardware accelerated, just Apple hasn't really bothered themselves to do this

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I was under the impression that OpenGL on M1 devices just passes through to Metal at this point.

Does OpenGL ES not get this treatment...?

My guess is that they haven’t wired the iOS Simulator to use the M1’s hardware acceleration. I’m pretty sure WebGL (which uses OpenGL ES) is hardware accelerated on M1.

And iOS apps not running within the Simulator have hardware accelerated OpenGL ES too.

Simulator support for GPU rendering is far from trivial so it isn't about "bothering". Metal jobs are packaged up along with shaders and proxied out to the host macOS Metal framework. Textures are backed by IOSurfaces which do some fancy Mach memory mapping tricks to share memory between your app in a simulator, the macOS side of Metal, and sometimes GPU memory (on Intel Macs with discrete GPUs). For the most part this is transparent to you and works even when Simulator vNext is running on macOS vPrevious.

The vast majority of developers are using higher-level system frameworks, an engine that has a Metal renderer already, use WebGPU, or use Metal on Apple platforms.

With the amount of cash apple has, it very much is about bothering. They have the resources to make their development tools not terrible, but instead they seem to be investing in... cash for a rainy day.

Maybe they plan to bring an M1 iPhone to market, so it's not worth the considerable engineering effort to fix a problem that will go away by itself in a while.

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