Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D

[mdedetrich]

OpenGL and saw the writing on the wall with Vulkan.

There is no good faith way to compare OpenGL to Vulan, while OpenGL is terrible Vulkan in comparison is a breath of fresh air and every serious user of Vulkan (i.e. game engine developers) love it.

There are 2 primary reasons why Apple created Metal. First is that at the time Vulkan didn't even exist when Apple wanted to Metal (it was still the proprietary Mantle at that point) and like any business, Apple isn't going to wait just cos and secondly they had so much bad blood with OpenGL + Nvidia/AMD that they simply put didn't want to rely on other companies.

Its highly probable if Vulkan was mature and stable at the time Apple was considering to make Metal that they wouldn't even bother with Metal especially seeing as how cleanly Metal maps to Vulkan (see MoltenVK)

[creative]

People still code games for opengl, they work fine.

[Daktyl198]

I don't think you properly understand the context of high level vs low level that this article is talking about. Vulkan is not a high level API in the same way OpenGL/DX<=11 is. Also the reason why DirectX beat OpenGL is not because one is high level and the other is low level, its because OpenGL was basically a mess for a lot of its life where as Microsoft went out of its way to make DirectX a pleasant API to code against (and this is what John Carmack alluded to when he the famous DirectX is better than OpenGL statement in the past)

You literally just made the same point I was making. OpenGL was and still is a huge mess to work with while DirectX was a pleasant API. Vulkan is following in the same footsteps as OpenGL, becoming a giant mess. As for high vs low level, I'm aware of what they mean. Vulkan when it was first released was considered to be at or below the level of Gallium, and so it was determined that there couldn't be a translation runtime below it similar to what Gallium did for OpenGL.

[Daktyl198]

Except that wasn't a mere performance uplift. It's an entirely new OpenGL driver built on AMD's more modern PAL architecture for user space drivers. The reason it was created is because their old OpenGL driver sucked so bad, that it was probably easier to just create a new driver than fix the old one.

This doesn't invalidate anything I said. AMD is still re-writing their OpenGL drivers years after the last major OpenGL because they had to hack together the old ones piecemeal with all of the extensions and updates. With a bit of "AMD's Windows drivers just suck" thrown in the mix.

Where did you get this wrong info? Apple has never implemented Vulkan api in MacOS. Also, they're own Metal API was released at least a year before Vulkan.

I got my timing a bit wrong on which came out first, but even after Vulkan came out and hit stable 1.0, they've chosen to not touch the API with a 100ft pole despite the fact that it would make writing cross-platform applications targeting Windows and macOS easier. They had to suffer through OpenGL, and they know Vulkan is going to turn out the same way. As somebody else mentioned, base Vulkan calls map quite well to the Metal API so it's not like it would be hard for them to implement initial Vulkan support... but they know how it's going to be keeping up with support 4 years from now. It's going to be hell.

[Daktyl198]

There is no good faith way to compare OpenGL to Vulan, while OpenGL is terrible Vulkan in comparison is a breath of fresh air and every serious user of Vulkan (i.e. game engine developers) love it.

There are 2 primary reasons why Apple created Metal. First is that at the time Vulkan didn't even exist when Apple wanted to Metal (it was still the proprietary Mantle at that point) and like any business, Apple isn't going to wait just cos and secondly they had so much bad blood with OpenGL + Nvidia/AMD that they simply put didn't want to rely on other companies.

Its highly probable if Vulkan was mature and stable at the time Apple was considering to make Metal that they wouldn't even bother with Metal especially seeing as how cleanly Metal maps to Vulkan (see MoltenVK)

1. Vulkan is only a breath of fresh air right now. I'm sure OpenGL was a joy to use before it had 7000 different APIs and you never knew which one to use when, or what was supported where. Vulkan in 4-5 years is going to be just as shitty to work with as OpenGL.

2. I got the timing wrong, but as you point out Vulkan maps pretty well to Metal. If that's the case, why has Apple not implemented Vulkan on macOS after it hit 1.0? It's not like it'd be hard if it maps so cleanly to what's already there. Or, why does the Khronos Group have to write and maintain the MoltenVK compatibility layer? Surely Apple would, if they don't want to implement the API itself, could implement a translation layer. They already have 2 of them they've written and implemented into the OS specifically for porting applications, what's another one?

It's because they suffered through OpenGL, and they know Vulkan is going the same way as OpenGL. They don't want the burden of maintaining anything that comes out of the Khronos Group because they know they'll hate their lives if they do so. Vulkan is a great idea and a great API, but given a few years nobody is going to want to touch it.

[mdedetrich]

You literally just made the same point I was making. OpenGL was and still is a huge mess to work with while DirectX was a pleasant API. Vulkan is following in the same footsteps as OpenGL, becoming a giant mess. As for high vs low level, I'm aware of what they mean. Vulkan when it was first released was considered to be at or below the level of Gallium, and so it was determined that there couldn't be a translation runtime below it similar to what Gallium did for OpenGL.

We are not making the same point, Vulkan isn't becoming a huge mess (well maybe on Linux in its internal implementation it is but thats another story and its also what is being fixed, hence this Phoronix article).

Also I think you unaware of what Vulkan is meant to be and what its not meant to be. Vulkan is NOT meant to be a nice high level API in the same way that DX 12 (which is Microsoft's equivalent) is also not a nice high level API. They are deliberately designed to be a low level API, almost like an assembler for GPU's. The idea is that game engine's/libraries for languages are designed to abstract over Vulkan to provide higher DX <= 11 like nice API's.

[smitty3268]

It's because they suffered through OpenGL, and they know Vulkan is going the same way as OpenGL.

Source? Who are you getting this from, or is it just your personal opinion?