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One aspect of their decision to run with Metal that surprises me, is that they decided the cost of developing and maintaining an API of that level of complexity
by ioquatix 10y ago
One aspect of their decision to run with Metal that surprises me, is that they decided the cost of developing and maintaining an API of that level of complexity was worth it. I'd like to know what they were thinking.
- Someone 10y agoI think they looked at how 'well' third parties developed Mac OS X drivers for OpenGL, and figured that wouldn't get better. Assuming they knew about Vulkan in time (Vulkan was announced at SigGraph 2014, about a year before Metal's _release_, so that may have been tight), I guess they assumed things wouldn't get better if they replaced OpenGL with another open technology. Also, from what I read, Vulkan doesn't do anything implicitly, OpenGL does lots of things implicitly. They may have thought that the optimum API lies between the two.
- chc 10y agoDon't Apple make their own crappy OpenGL drivers, not third parties?
- Someone 10y agoI don't think Apple ever publicly stated anything about it, but my $0.02 is on "The latter seems more plausible to me" in http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/213893 http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/213893: "There is debate over whether Apple make the entire driver set themselves, or just take NVidia/AMD's core code & add their own hardware/OS-specific code to it. The latter seems more plausible to me, but either is just speculation." I also notice that that page mentions drivers that can be downloaded directly from Nvidia, but gives no indication that either driver is significantly better than the other. That is not inconsistent with them essentially using the same source code.