Apple Proposing A New, Lower-Level Graphics API For The Web

[theriddick]

Its like Apple deliberately hamstrings themselves in order to hamstring Linux, because if they supported Vulkan then we would likely see games/software that appear on Apple iOS also appear on Linux almost at same time... Can't have that.

[geearf]

To quote from the linked article:



What they're notably *not* saying is that Vulkan does have pretty good cross-platform support, and the one major platform not supporting it is Apple... the same Apple who are proposing this new API instead of just doing a web-adaptation of Vulkan.

I was asking why *we* need this, not why is Apple (or another company) against it

Which one of those did they actually start as opposed to support, adopt and fork?

Alas, only one of those 3 I believe, which is still better than other major companies

[illwieckz]

On the desktop there's now Vulkan for Linux/Android systems, Direct3D 12 for Windows, and Metal for macOS systems

Michael Well, with this kind of wording I'm sure there is some people who will think « Use Vulkan if you target casual gamers on mobile or geeky nerds, Direct3D 12 if you want to target the large PC market and serious gamers, or Metal if you target hipsters » and this understanding will be wrong since the largest Vulkan user base is the Windows one, the currant Vulkan user base is precisely that « large PC market » and the « serious gaming market ». Vulkan was never meant to be a Linux or Android thing first, it was meant to be a multiplateform standard first, including Windows first (for example, Mantle which inspired a lot Vulkan was Windows only).

The real market for Direct3D 12 is the Xbox market, the one who don't target the Xbox market have no need for Direct3D 12.

The major platform technologies in this space are Direct3D 12 from Microsoft, Metal from Apple, and Vulkan from the Khronos Group. While these technologies have similar design concepts, unfortunately none are available across all platforms.

For sure, if people writing newspapers like you considers Vulkan as a Linux/Android thing first and not as a multiplatform thing, it will not help to get it available accross all platforms.

[suberimakuri]

Can't the Intel vulkan driver be ported to Mac OS? That would leave iOS no?
it's not as if there is a lack of vulkan driver source to use as a base.
These guys.....

[juno]

Can't the Intel vulkan driver be ported to Mac OS? That would leave iOS no?

Yeah, Imagination, the company that provides the GPUs for iOS devices also strongly supports Vulkan.
And of course, radeons (used in Macs alongside Intel) also have multiple Vulkan implementations.

[Duve]

What they're notably *not* saying is that Vulkan does have pretty good cross-platform support, and the one major platform not supporting it is Apple... the same Apple who are proposing this new API instead of just doing a web-adaptation of Vulkan.

I wish I could say that I am shocked, I am not. I don't see a reason for a new standard when it would be better to simply leverage Vulkan-over-WebGL, but Apple will be apple. I guess they want to be in the drivers seat on this, which given the direction that Webkit continues on.... I am not so sure that is the wisest of choices.

[computerquip]

I know LLVM was a University of Illinois project, and WebKit is a fork of KHTML, but who is to blame for OpenCL? Wikipedia says Apple started OpenCL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#History), though that's hardly irrefutable evidence…

I actually hadn't heard of that. I thought Khronos created the standard (which according to that, they finalized it into OpenCL 1.0 outside of Apple). I'm having issues finding a citation for Apple being the founder of OpenCL. I suppose the fact that they hold trademark rights is more than enough though.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

https://github.com/gpuweb/admin/issues/1#issuecomment-278213012

[geearf]

I actually hadn't heard of that. I thought Khronos created the standard (which according to that, they finalized it into OpenCL 1.0 outside of Apple). I'm having issues finding a citation for Apple being the founder of OpenCL. I suppose the fact that they hold trademark rights is more than enough though.

Khronos might have created the standard in the same way they did with Vulkan, by heavily basing themselves on a previous non-standard proprietary specification, though in this case, keeping the name the same

[kenjitamura]

did apple ever give a valid, logical reason why they ditched vulkan and created their own in house metal api?

Mantle, Metal, and Direct3D12 all seemed to sprout out around the same time and no one would have guessed at the time AMD would hand over Mantle to start an open standard so it probably seemed like a no brainer for apple at the time to keep developing metal since one of the solutions was platform locked and the other was only going to be supported by a single gpu vendor in all likelihood.

Then metal, with all its developer resources committed to it, had already been around for like two years by the time Vulkan came out so they decided to keep it after the significant investment it represented. Why they're refusing to support Vulkan entirely though I couldn't tell you.