Vulkan SDK Now Formally Available For Apple Platforms - Including Apple Silicon Support

[Alexmitter]

The bigger issue is that Metal is so limited and backwards that it is hard to even support Vulkan to Metal call translation at all. Metal is more of a restricted Mantel API clone.

[Aryma]

That is very misleading

Vulkan is not available on macOS, it is the Emulation Layer that is available, with it comes huge performance cost

Stop misleading people, this is a problem with open source and "linux" people, their strategies are ugly, they love to mislead people, and they take everything for granted

I am glad apple went with Metal wich is cleaner and more performant than Vulkan

Wine and Vulkan are a huge mistake, no wonder why linux usage on steam is stuck bellow 0.7% despite MASSIVE investments

I'm glad people like use apple
and I'm not surprised if you like apple like god-like company

[dragon321]

That is very misleading
I am glad apple went with Metal wich is cleaner and more performant than Vulkan

I'm sure you wrote a lot of code in both APIs and can easily provide benchmarks and examples that proves Metal superiority over Vulkan.

[Steffo]

Vulkan is a DirectX and Metal killer

Vulkan doesn't kill anything than OpenGL.

[ctwise]

The bigger issue is that Metal is so limited and backwards that it is hard to even support Vulkan to Metal call translation at all. Metal is more of a restricted Mantel API clone.

Believe it or not, this is potentially helpful. I've searched before for comparisons between current-ish Metal and current-ish Vulkan and not found anything useful at a technical level. Even coverage of the issues that MoltenVK runs into having to run on Metal. Do you have any links you can point me to?

[dragon321]

Vulkan doesn't kill anything than OpenGL.

To be honest Vulkan doesn't even kill OpenGL. At least not directly. Khronos stated many times that Vulkan is not OpenGL replacement and latter will be still supported and developed. In reality Vulkan slowly replaces OpenGL. It's happening because Vulkan simply is superior. It is harder and requires more work but also lacks OpenGL issues. It's also better suited for multi threading.

[emblemparade]

To be honest Vulkan doesn't even kill OpenGL. At least not directly. Khronos stated many times that Vulkan is not OpenGL replacement and latter will be still supported and developed. In reality Vulkan slowly replaces OpenGL. It's happening because Vulkan simply is superior. It is harder and requires more work but also lacks OpenGL issues. It's also better suited for multi threading.

(I am both a Vulkan and OpenGL programmer.) You (and Khronos) are right that the two APIs don't exactly compete. Indeed, many of us are hoping that OpenGL will evolve to be a higher level API on top of Vulkan, which would greatly simplify GPU drivers (and also make it easier to squeeze more performance out of them in some situations). We already have some decent implementations of OpenGL on top of Vulkan, but there's various awkwardness there due to different underlying concepts built into each. It would be great to see a future version of OpenGL (5?) that is more aligned with Vulkan and specifically designed to run on top of it, perhaps with a reference implementation published by Khronos/Lunar.

[Boland]

The bigger issue is that Metal is so limited and backwards that it is hard to even support Vulkan to Metal call translation at all. Metal is more of a restricted Mantel API clone.

This isn’t entirely correct. The ‘limitations’ in metal that make fully supporting Vulkan tricky are legacy features such as Geometry Shaders that have no business being used today, but are needed for emulating older apis over Vulkan (and then to Metal). Metal also looks nothing like Mantle from an API standpoint.

Metal also has a bunch for features that Vulkan doesn’t have that are especially useful on Apples TBDR Gpus. Image blocks, Tile Shaders, Function Pointers etc..

[pal666]

Vulkan is not available on macOS, it is the Emulation Layer that is available

does it expose vulkan interface? if yes, then vulkan is indeed available on macos

, with it comes huge performance cost

it's a quality of implementation issue. anyone can write slow driver and it will still be vulkan. btw, now much "huge" is numbers?

this is a problem with open source and "linux" people

this is a problem with imbecilic apple slaves

I am glad apple went with Metal wich is cleaner and more performant than Vulkan

self-flagellating slaves are funny

Wine and Vulkan are a huge mistake, no wonder why linux usage on steam is stuck bellow 0.7% despite MASSIVE investments

moron, do you know that macos is target audience for wine devs? which when combined with $billions of investments from apple is much more MASSIVE and got measly 3% of macos share on steam.

[paradroid]

When Metal came out 2014 it was not usable for serious 3D. This took apple 3 years and even then it was quite bad. 2019 was the stable release which could compete with Vulkan.