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

The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple's macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers.

Tuesday's MoltenVK update brings support for VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace / VK_EXT_hdr_metadata, support for Metal 3.0 driver capabilities, native texture swizzling support, support for compressed 3D images on macOS, additional color-space options support, Xcode 11.1 toolchain support, reduced memory usage in some scenarios along with memory leak fixes, and a variety of other Vulkan bits were tweaked or added for this Apple portability layer.

More details on this new MoltenVK feature release can be found via the project's GitHub.

Considering the Dota 2 Vulkan performance on macOS via MoltenVK as shown in the MacBook Pro benchmarks on Windows / Linux / macOS, hopefully more game developers will decide to begin making use of Vulkan with MoltenVK when targeting Apple's operating systems.