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

[wizard69]

This is hilarious and I still use Mac computers and the OS.

That is very misleading

Not as much as this post. The wording is less than ideal with the subject line so I can agree there, but the body of the article is pretty straight forward.

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

It isn't what I would call emulation.

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

Well yeah that is true about people heavily involved in Linux or open source. That has little to do with this article though.

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

It is derived from the same historical body of software.

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

Actually WINE is pretty nice. However I don't use it for gaming so your BS about steam doesn't mean much.

As for Vulkan, the more places it can be used the more software that will be written for it. In many case performance isn't even a concern, portability of code is.

[wizard69]

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.

OpenGL is in its current form because the big users of it (CAD companies for one) are very reluctant to evolve it in a way that companies like Apple and others would like to have seen. That drove Apple and others into these alternative solutions. I really doubt that we will see OpenGL evolve in a way that many would like. There are just too many very large code bases that would break and a lot of incentive to keep it as stable as possible for the key users.

[dragon321]

OpenGL is in its current form because the big users of it (CAD companies for one) are very reluctant to evolve it in a way that companies like Apple and others would like to have seen. That drove Apple and others into these alternative solutions. I really doubt that we will see OpenGL evolve in a way that many would like. There are just too many very large code bases that would break and a lot of incentive to keep it as stable as possible for the key users.

Vulkan is better but it's not total OpenGL replacement. If you don't care about controlling everything and simply wants to render some things on screen then clearly Vulkan isn't option. Amount of work it requires before "just drawing" makes it not very suitable for these purposes. That's why OpenGL is alive and will be alive. It's for developers that simply want to render things. Maybe in future native OpenGL drivers will disappear in favour of OpenGL on Vulkan implementations but OpenGL as API won't disappear soon.

Apple, just like Microsoft, wanted to make their own API to maintain full control over it. That's why instead of creating and adopting Vulkan they decided to make Metal. They also abandoned OpenGL long time ago - macOS supports only OpenGL 4.1, released in 2010.

(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.

Yes, I also think that in future native OpenGL drivers will disappear and will be replaced by Vulkan implementations. Probably next OpenGL releases will be focused more on interoperability with Vulkan, just like 4.6 added SPIR-V support.