MoltenVK Picks Up Metal 3.0 Capabilities, More Vulkan Features On macOS

[wizard69]

Which doesn't justify Apple's current position on Vulkan. It almost looks like the reason for Metal exclusivity nowadays is "F@#$ you, that's why!"

I think you need to remove head from behind and look around a bit, maybe open ones mind and learn something. Apple doesn’t have a position on Vulkan, at least I never saw one offered up publicly. What they do have is their own 3D solution that is very Vulkan like. The last thing they should be doing is pulling the rug out from under developers just to use Vulkan.

Frankly I have no problem at all with the Metal/Vulkan situation on MacOS. What I do have a problem with is OpenGL support which is in a very poor state on MacOS. That is directly due to the large volume of software out there that is built with OpenGL and probably will be forever.

[ermo]

This doesn't make any business sense. Apple's whole business is built around macOS and iOS not being available on cheap non-Apple hardware. Using a proprietary graphics API is one such measure.

Not saying that's morally right but you don't become a billion dollar company by releasing open standards.

(emphasis mine)

My next door neighbour is a Mac man. He's got MacBook Pro and a Hackintosh. He uses the Hackintosh more, because he feels the keyboard on his MacBook is abysmal.

There's apparently a burgeoning market for making Mac-like accessories that are actually designed for commodity PC hardware because the Mac EFI emulators have become so good.

All Apple had to do was to have a decent Mac Pro strategy that was priced 10-20% over the equivalent PCs, but with better hardware integration and delicious design and the Mac guys would buy them. But they aren't so the Mac guys happily Hackintosh away.

[simburde]

I think you need to remove head from behind and look around a bit, maybe open ones mind and learn something. Apple doesn’t have a position on Vulkan, at least I never saw one offered up publicly. What they do have is their own 3D solution that is very Vulkan like. The last thing they should be doing is pulling the rug out from under developers just to use Vulkan.

Frankly I have no problem at all with the Metal/Vulkan situation on MacOS. What I do have a problem with is OpenGL support which is in a very poor state on MacOS. That is directly due to the large volume of software out there that is built with OpenGL and probably will be forever.

That's somewhat rude, don't you think so? But it's a common psychological reaction for a Stockholm syndrome victim. Don't take it personally, it's just an observation.

The lack of public position for more than 3 years is a position in itself. And this position only adds to the entropy. Valve put a lot of money into MoltenVK to reach MacOS, Feral had to create their own solution for the same reason. Game developers cannot easily target this platform like Windows or Linux. Apple thinks of itself as "too-big-to-fail" company and gives a rat's ass about users and developers. And that's the core reason of your problem with OpenGL. BTW with Zink evolving Mac users might get good OpenGL support if Apple adds Vulkan to their OSes. Nobody's talking about removing Metal in favor of Vulkan, all rugs may stay where they are.

[Guest]

This doesn't make any business sense. Apple's whole business is built around macOS and iOS not being available on cheap non-Apple hardware. Using a proprietary graphics API is one such measure.

Not saying that's morally right but you don't become a billion dollar company by releasing open standards.

Making sure developing for your own platform is even worse than it already was is a great way to make sure your software catalog will be lacking, so I think even when you're that big, it's just doing harm to yourself.

[GruenSein]

Making sure developing for your own platform is even worse than it already was is a great way to make sure your software catalog will be lacking, so I think even when you're that big, it's just doing harm to yourself.

Their financial results in the last ten years suggest that they are not lacking anything all too important to their customers. I mean, it is a bit like gaming consoles. They simply don't want the nicer iOS apps to be available on Android. And AFAIK developing for iOS is still more profitable than developing for Android - simply because of different spending habbits. There is no broad lack in their software catalogue. What we (as in tech savvy enthusiasts who read forums like this one all the time) might wish for is absolutely irrelevant in terms of overall sales.

[andrei_me]

Metal was released 2 years before Vulkan at a time where OpenGL was going nowhere and DirectX obviously wasn't an option.

Same reason for lightning cable, it was released a couple years before USB-C

[nuetzel]

If Apple really cared about graphical APIs and games, they would have improved its OpenGL and GLES support instead of supporting several version older versions, years behind Windows and Linux.

If you're thinking "yeah, but why would they update a high level API when they had a modern low level API like Metal?", I have to remind you Apple was using outdated versions of OpenGL several years before Metal was conceived. OpenGL was the only thing they had for games and applications, and still let it stagnate and didn't update it, despite newer version were more efficient and facilitated porting apps. They simply didn't care.

Apple could have waited two years for Vulkan like they waited several years for any OpenGL update, but the company wanted to take advantage of its dominant position to promote a standard of its own, so iOS app devs would have it a bit harder to port apps to other platforms (Android).

And on top of that Mantel was there (2013) the direct predecessor of Vulkan.

[lowflyer]

It's a pity that MoltenVK is released under the Apache license. Apple can now just wait and "take over" MoltenVK when they see their Metal failing. Perhaps it would have been a better choice to use the LGPL license - but this might have prevented it from the AppStore.

[Boland]

Valve put a lot of money into MoltenVK to reach MacOS, Feral had to create their own solution for the same reason. Game developers cannot easily target this platform like Windows or Linux.

Feral targets metal directly with their porting libraries. They don’t go Vulkan-Metal.

If you’re using Unreal or Unity, you get metal for free.

[Boland]

The way that I understand this is that Matal and Vulkan are both derived from the same base software. As noted metal actually shipped earlier so the slight differences are now backed in. For the most part the mapping from Vulkan to Metal is fairly straight forward with a lot of direct mapping.

While they are conceptually similar, the actual APIs are nothing alike. Metal is far more simple to work with (memory management, binding model etc), metal is also objective-C.

The shading languages are also miles apart.