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That seems a little unfair. They did a bit of this in the last couple of rounds - introducing Metal, for example, or all the energy work they did a couple of re
by matthewmacleod 10y ago
That seems a little unfair. They did a bit of this in the last couple of rounds - introducing Metal, for example, or all the energy work they did a couple of releases ago.
Baby steps :)
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoMetal is basically their proprietary version of Vulkan isn't it?
- orbitur 10y agoMetal came out before Vulkan.
- masklinn 10y agoIt's conceptually similar, but is probably more properly related to Mantle (the AMD API later donated to Khronos, which they developed into Vulkan) and its initial release predates that of Vulkan by ~18 months (Metal was announced in September 2014 for iOS, the OSX port was released in June 2015, the initial release of Vulkan was in February 2016).
- izym 10y agoSomewhat, but with more (forced) automatic resource management.
- izacus 10y agoMetal is a proprietary 3D technology ported from iOS. Apple chose to do another closed tech instead of adopting Vulkan or fixing their slow OpenGL implementation. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Metal is about 30% faster than OpenGL on OS X, which is interesting because OpenGL is about 30% slower on OS X than on Windows. Which means they're forcing developers to use their proprietary API to get comparable 3D performance. How is that a good thing?
- mayoff 10y agoTo be fair (regarding "closed tech"), Apple was hardly the only one to release a propriety Vulkan alternative (there's also Mantle and DX12) and Apple released Metal to developers almost two years before Vulkan 1.0 was released.
- izacus 10y agoHmm, what does "to be fair" mean in this context? That it's ok because other people did a shitty move as well?
- fredoliveira 10y agoIt feels like you're completely ignoring the second part of his sentence.
- Grazester 10y agoDidn't Mantle give rise to Vulkan?
- masklinn 10y agoYes, Mantle was donated to Khronos in early 2015 (or maybe late 2014) and became the basis for the new glNext effort (after the failure of Long Peaks)
- jsheard 10y agoThe difference is the Windows driver model allows IHVs to implement Vulkan alongside the proprietary DX12. Microsoft may not support it but they've provided the framework to let it happen anyway. In contrast Apple exclusively controls the macOS graphics stack top to bottom, so as long as they don't explicitly support Vulkan they're forcing developers to use their proprietary API.
- chc 10y agoVulkan is based on Mantle, and DX12 can coexist with Vulkan because Microsoft doesn't take responsibility for all of Windows' OpenGL and Vulkan support. In this area at least, Apple really is doubling down on proprietary technology where others aren't so much.