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A Prototype Of The Vulkan Portability Initiative: Low-Level 3D To Vulkan / D3D12 / Metal

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  • #11
    Originally posted by geearf View Post

    GPU drivers for Mac OS (and maybe iOS too) are done by Apple, not the GPU companies, so Apple gets to decide.
    That wasn't the question. The question was, what stops anyone from implementing Vulkan for macOS? Aren't Nvidia and AMD releasing some drivers for it? See one example here. iOS is different since Apple prevents installation of anything 3rd party, but it should be possible on macOS, no?

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    • #12
      Originally posted by shmerl View Post
      That wasn't the question. The question was, what stops anyone from implementing Vulkan for macOS?
      Of course it's possible, but you would have to reverse engineer the macOS graphics stack which would be insane.

      Originally posted by shmerl View Post
      Aren't Nvidia and AMD releasing some drivers for it?
      As he said, no they don't since Apple are developing their GPU drivers themselves.

      Originally posted by shmerl View Post
      See one example here.
      Never seen that before, but it seems to only be CUDA and not a complete graphics driver.
      If it's only CUDA, they certainly had access to source code of the macOS driver to implement their CUDA support ontop of, and that's not accesible for anyone.
      Could be wrong though, the page isn't very specific.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by johanb View Post
        Never seen that before, but it seems to only be CUDA and not a complete graphics driver.
        If it's only CUDA, they certainly had access to source code of the macOS driver to implement their CUDA support ontop of, and that's not accesible for anyone.
        Could be wrong though, the page isn't very specific.
        It explicitly says:

        "New in Release 378.05.05.05f01:
        • Graphics driver updated for macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (16E195)"

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        • #14
          Originally posted by GruenSein View Post

          It explicitly says:

          "New in Release 378.05.05.05f01:
          • Graphics driver updated for macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (16E195)"
          It's not impossible, but it has to be signed and it's rare that users install drivers. And that is sorta the point. Besides look at the state of nouveau no clock or vulkan, some instability.

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          • #15
            I have little to no experience coding 3D graphics, so this might be an incredibly stupid question, but here goes...How much can be achieved if you just ran a script on the codebase of say Direct3D 12 to turn all the Direct3D calls into say Vulkan calls? Like just a script that applies a bunch of regex replaces or something. Is that a viable option to do some of the work as a starting point?

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            • #16
              Nobody yet replied with this?

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              • #17
                Originally posted by AJenbo View Post

                It's not impossible, but it has to be signed and it's rare that users install drivers. And that is sorta the point. Besides look at the state of nouveau no clock or vulkan, some instability.
                I dont follow. The discussion revolved around the question if it was possible to have non-Apple-made drivers on macOS. The posted link to the Nvidia page seems to confirm that it is possible. I do agree that generally it is Apple's goal to deliver the required hardware drivers without requiring any user action. Not sure what Nouveau has to do with it.

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                • #18
                  Am I the only one seeing mangled website design at the top right at the page navigation? (Not allowed to post screenshot)
                  Same with FF and Chromium.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by GruenSein View Post

                    I dont follow. The discussion revolved around the question if it was possible to have non-Apple-made drivers on macOS. The posted link to the Nvidia page seems to confirm that it is possible. I do agree that generally it is Apple's goal to deliver the required hardware drivers without requiring any user action. Not sure what Nouveau has to do with it.
                    With very little Mac OS knowledge, I'd say that I don't really know that this is a non-Apple-made driver, for all I know it was made by both Nvidia and Apple and is being offered on Nvidia's website.

                    There's also the possibility of requiring signatures for drivers and not allowing drivers without them to run.

                    I'd be very interested to know as well, these are only hypothesis

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by shmerl View Post
                      That wasn't the question. The question was, what stops anyone from implementing Vulkan for macOS?
                      Since Yosemite (10.10) Apple kernel drivers (called "kext") must be signed to show that Apple approves them. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/41095...ate/index.html

                      Technically speaking it can be turned off https://apple.stackexchange.com/ques...10-10-yosemite but Apple can block that too pretty easily if they see you pissing in their little walled garden.

                      Aren't Nvidia and AMD releasing some drivers for it?
                      Yes but it is reasonable to assume that Apple has some contract with them to make sure they only offer openGL and Metal with their drivers. Because they do.

                      On Windows there is no such restriction and device manufacturers can offer any kind of API they want through their drivers.

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