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

[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

[brad0]

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

Not like Microsoft or game consoles are any better.

[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.

[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?)

[Terr-E]

"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..."

"I don't buy this argument, because Apple have pools of cash they have no idea how to use. Supporting Vulkan is peanuts change for them even if it meant discarding their own NIH. It's an appropriate thing to do, which they refuse because they are jerks, not because of any valid reason."

Also, running dual-stack (supporting Metal and Vulkan side- by side) would would certainly be possible from a technical standpoint. It would be no problem technically or financially to support what is fast becoming an industry standard. Matter of the fact is, they just don't want to. They're even worse than Microsoft in this because at least on Windows you can have native Vulkan drivers, even if Microsoft themselves don't officially support it (in favor of DirectX 12). I feel like they're the petulant rich kid who doesn't want to play nice with others because they don't want to admit they're wrong. And they feel they don't have to because they have money.

[Anarchy]

I don't understand why people want to put so much effort into a project that Apple obviously doesn't want to happen. It's not like Apple doesn't have the manpower or resources to bring forth Vulkan on the mac, they just don't want to.

[gigaplex]

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...

Ironically, Vulkan is a spin-off from AMD's short-lived Mantle API, also from around 2014.

[shmerl]

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...

I don't buy this argument, because Apple have pools of cash they have no idea how to use. Supporting Vulkan is peanuts change for them even if it meant discarding their own NIH. It's an appropriate thing to do, which they refuse because they are jerks, not because of any valid reason.

[mike456]

Apple tries to lock users to their hardware as MS did and still does for his OS. Nothing new.

[tildearrow]

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

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...