MoltenVK Updated For Providing Vulkan 1.1.130 SDK Support On Apple macOS/iOS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: MoltenVK Updated For Providing Vulkan 1.1.130 SDK Support On Apple macOS/iOS

MoltenVK has now caught up against the latest Vulkan upstream specification for the time being in supporting Vulkan translated to Apple's Metal API on macOS and iOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MoltenVK-For-Vulkan-1.1.130

[Xaero_Vincent]

I wonder if Feral uses MoltenVK in the Mac ports of games that they also bring to Linux on Vulkan?

[SkyWarrior]

They are already using metal for mac OS ports. Unfortunately nobody cares about moltenvk.

[tildearrow]

Unfortunately nobody cares about moltenvk.

You are wrong.
Actually, nobody cares about Metal and they all wish Apple would just adopt Vulkan, but their arrogance prevents them from doing so.

[SkyWarrior]

Don't get me wrong. On the apple corp end of things nobody cares about vulkan. They are just arrogant enough to not see it coming and they are willfully committing this crime to their userbase. Feral is just trying to do it's best to support all they can to make money. I am thinking that developing for apple may not be really worth their time.

[Leopard]

Don't get me wrong. On the apple corp end of things nobody cares about vulkan. They are just arrogant enough to not see it coming and they are willfully committing this crime to their userbase. Feral is just trying to do it's best to support all they can to make money. I am thinking that developing for apple may not be really worth their time.

Metal released 2 years before Vulkan. As you can imagine they invested in Metal way earlier and they don't want to throw it to thrash. Since ecosystems catching up is not easy and Metal already works well for Apple's main interest anyway : Ios devices.

As for the MVK usage on MacOS and Ios ; MVK is not feature complete and it is a very hard task i guess since Metal can't expose some of the low level concepts that Vulkan has.

There are still many use cases for MVK and even some community related projects are opt in for this. Iirc Dolphin Emulator's Mac version was utilizing MVK.

Though if you really need to push Mac hw to limits on let's say AAA ports like Feral does , usage of MVK won't cut it.

That being said ; Mac hardware is usually dominated by Intel igpu's. Valve's MVK games ( Dota 2, Underlords ) are titles that are keeping Intel igu compat in mind always. So they're not pushing hw to limits on any platform.

[SkyWarrior]

You are right that they invested in earlier however although they may want metal to be their primary API for anything they render on screen supporting vulkan sideways should not be something they should be afraid of.

[wizard69]

You are right that they invested in earlier however although they may want metal to be their primary API for anything they render on screen supporting vulkan sideways should not be something they should be afraid of.

My understanding is that Metal and Vulkan share a development history. That is they are more similar than different. If true a shim product like this should be easy to maintain.

the problem with Apple themselves maintaining a new interface is that it is disruptive to their developer base. This is an especially critical issue because Apple wasn’t known for maintaining OpenGL and other solutions well. They really have a need to demonstrate that they can pick a solution and stay with it and more importantly keep it performant.

we could argue that Apple should have waited for Vulkan but at the time there would not have been one serious developer that would have found that acceptable. Metal is the direct result of developers complaining loudly about OpenGL on the platform. The only concern most developers have today is that Apple keeps Metal up to date and not let it age like so many other Apple initiatives.

[SkyWarrior]

I thought OpenGL was intentionally left lagging by apple on mac OS for a long time. I remember that OpenGL version 4.1 was still OpenGL 4.1 after soo many releases of mac OS since yosemite or el capitan?

One serious problem for metal is that the development seems to be only through apple updates which may come infrequently therefore feature wise it could already be behind vulkan, or DX12 etc.

One other thing that comes to mind is the apple's willingness to design their own GPU arch which they pretty much did with iOS devices. Also apple does not seem to like open technologies (idea of removing perl, python etc from the main OS install)..

[Marc Driftmeyer]

You are wrong.
Actually, nobody cares about Metal and they all wish Apple would just adopt Vulkan, but their arrogance prevents them from doing so.

Keep being delusional. Metal is the focus for anyone wanting to port to macOS/iOS.