Vulkan Comes To Apple Silicon GPUs / M1 By Means Of MoltenVK 1.1.1

[OneTimeShot]

Yawn... This garbage again. Remember AMD Mantle? Metal, Vulkan and DX12 are all broadly based on that.

Which is why you can get Vulkan to run on Metal with a small shim library... and you only need to do that if for some reason you aren't using a game engine that supports both (Unity?)

[Calinou]

Yawn... This garbage again. Remember AMD Mantle? Metal, Vulkan and DX12 are all broadly based on that.

Which is why you can get Vulkan to run on Metal with a small shim library... and you only need to do that if for some reason you aren't using a game engine that supports both (Unity?)

There are a lot of older applications which will never feature a Metal renderer. Not to mention small/medium-sized open source projects which don't have any contributors to maintain Metal renderers as well.

[brad0]

As usual, Apple as lock-in jerks refuse to support Vulkan directly.

Not like Microsoft or game consoles are any better.

[V1tol]

Another big difference is that Metal is Objective-C (and Swift) API and Vulkan is C. That rare iOS or Mac folks who use Metal directly won't like to switch to C. Metal came out first 2 years before Vulkan - and for 2 years iOS/Mac developers were using it (directly or indirectly). So basically when Vulkan appeared, Metal already had some codebase, frameworks etc.

And knowing all this Apple has choice - add Vulkan implementation atop of Metal (and they won't because MoltenVK is already here), or throw away all their efforts, use Vulkan as base and rewrite Metal on top of it to avoid user software breakage. Does not look realistic to me

[andrei_me]

One possible reason for this is that Metal came out first (in 2014), and they weren't wishing to have a graphics API that only lasts 1 year and a half...

This, just like with USB-C, they went for their lightning cable 1 year before USB-C being launched, now they have that awkward setup with some devices with lightning meanwhile others with USB-C

[kuco]

And knowing all this Apple has choice - add Vulkan implementation atop of Metal (and they won't because MoltenVK is already here), or throw away all their efforts, use Vulkan as base and rewrite Metal on top of it to avoid user software breakage. Does not look realistic to me

Or just support Vulkan like all other platforms (except consoles)? It's not like your OS is only allowed to support 1 api.

[Boland]

Image blocks, tile shaders, argument buffers etc.. None of these have a Vulkan equivalent.
You've got to remember Metal was built with Apple's TBDR GPUs in mind, Vulkan was not.

There is a lot more nuance to this than 'Apple are just jerks'.

[duby229]

Image blocks, tile shaders, argument buffers etc.. None of these have a Vulkan equivalent.
You've got to remember Metal was built with Apple's TBDR GPUs in mind, Vulkan was not.

There is a lot more nuance to this than 'Apple are just jerks'.

Well, as far as third party repair of Apple products they -are- jerks.... Of course that is totally unrelated to Metal though...

[lucrus]

There is a lot more nuance to this than 'Apple are just jerks'.

No, there's nothing more than that. See the comment just before yours.

[Boland]

No, there's nothing more than that. See the comment just before yours.

I saw that comment. Everything I posted in my first comment still stands and was a reply to that.
Apple have their own GPUs now, they've designed an API that works hand in hand with the features they need and want.

After getting shat on by Khronos when they donated OpenCL and not being able to evolve it like they wanted to, I don't blame them for not wanting to go down the API by committee approach again.

But then again, they are going down the API by committee route (WebGPU) although outside of Khronos.