5 ms·

I wonder what the means for Apple and their desire for Metal over Vulkan?

by protomyth 9y ago

infinisil 9y ago
I really hope they'll catch that train, it may be their last chance to get onto tomorrows graphics stack
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- MBCook 9y ago
  I think Apple has made it abundantly clear they don't care. They've never released terribly good or performant open GL drivers on OS X. My understanding is they've always been quite behind on features. Apple has an API they make that will be nice and fast and do everything they want and they can update anytime they want. And because it's the same one it's going to be used on iOS and other places it will have support and people use it. There will be tooling for it. They tried open CL and lost, along with their approach on the Mac Pro, I don't really see them going forward with it. It seems pretty clear that CUDA is what people really want right now, that's another proprietary API. I'm not sure what the big drive for having Vulcan on Apple platforms is other than to be on the "standard". That gives Apple some benefits but they don't seem to think it's worth it. I'm not entirely sure they're wrong, especially given that Apple can make an API that fits very well with their custom chip that they put in hundreds of millions of devices. The fact that Apple operates the whole stack lets them do some of the stuff they do faster than anyone else, using Vulcan wouldn't give them that.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    > The fact that Apple operates the whole stack lets them do some of the stuff they do faster than anyone else, using Vulcan wouldn't give them that. There isn't anything I'm aware of that Metal can do faster than Vulkan can. The situation is simply that Apple doesn't care, since they're invested in Metal and see no reason to switch. Developers are forced to use Metal because it's the only thing Apple supports, and Apple sees no reason to make it easier to port applications to competing platforms. This decision may or may not be a conscious effort to create lock-in, but whether malicious or not, it hurts developers like me who have to develop modern cross-platform graphics applications.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      What I was referring to there is that since Apple makes the chips (for iOS only, for now) and Apple makes the API and Apple makes the drivers (even on the Mac side) then Apple can implement new features they come up with faster than others. For example if Apple makes a new bit of the A23 chip that is designed to do some Neville feature that's not currently in Vulkan or Metal ( to make up something stupid, something that accelerates replacing colors of an image with their square roots) Apple can put it in the shading language and the driver extremely fast. They can have it ready for announcement. On the other hand with Vulkan Nvidia or someone else would have to do some other process (I'm assuming it has some sort of extension support the way OpenGL did) and it would only get standardized later, if at all. Or maybe it's not a new feature that gets exposed to developers. Maybe it's something along the lines of because Apple knows how the chips work and the shading pipeline and all that other stuff they are able to get extra information out of it to help reduce power draw where if they were using someone else's API it wouldn't be nearly as easy to glean information necessary. > This decision may or may not be a conscious effort to create lock-in, but whether malicious or not, it hurts developers like me who have to develop modern cross-platform graphics applications. My read on thing is that Apple doesn't really try to CREATE lock-in anymore, they just do what's best for Apple and that is often a side effect. It seems like a lot of cross platform stuff has gone to using intermediate frameworks (at least in gaming) so I guess they're just sort of counting on that to bridge the gap. Outside of that (professional things) I'm guessing they think they either have enough market that they can get people to follow (possibly with some help from Apple) or they just don't think it's important enough to bother with. The way Apple has been letting professionals just sort of sit there hoping for updates for a couple of years has been well documented, that may be the case here too. But like I said earlier, it's not like they ever had very good OpenGL support either. Are they treating a bad implementation of an old API for a good implementation of their own? Assuming they don't want to make a good implementation of the standard API (because obviously they don't) is that a good trade off? I don't know enough to make any reasonable guess.
      - theparanoid 9y ago
        Apparently what's best for Apple is having crappy graphics drivers. Cause that's what they have right now.
pjmlp 9y ago
Nothing. Although they created OpenCL, they lost interest in keeping it up to date long time ago. The future of OpenCL on Apple platforms is Metal Compute and I bet there is nothing at WWDC 2017 that will contradict this.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Metal will die out, but it till take Apple a very long time to realize it's pointless.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    The market share of iOS is so tiny.
mathnode 9y ago
Metal has been out and working for two years. And working well. Apple have a graphics API. Microsoft have a graphics API. Sony have a graphics API. Nvidia have their own libraries and compilers and so do AMD.
- zanny 9y ago
  And developers love rewriting their graphical backends for every target platform, its the best!
  - bronxbomber92 9y ago
    In reality, for most developers, it is a non-issue to bringup a new graphics API backend. See, for example, Arseny Kapoulkine's experience porting to Metal: http://zeuxcg.org/2016/12/01/metal-retrospective http://zeuxcg.org/2016/12/01/metal-retrospective
    - ioquatix 9y ago
      One example is not most developers. I'm a developer and I get paid to write hardware accelerated renderers and for the past two years I've been recommending Vulkan.. I'm exclusively using Linux these days for software development. Sometimes it's not about what you're targeting for deployment but the capabilities of the development machine. For example, I do like Xcode, but I can't use it for Vulkan development, even if my ultimate platform isn't macOS/Apple. Apple dropped the ball on Vulkan and I do hope they support it eventually.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        Good luck using Vulkan on the PS, XBox or 93% of Android devices out there.
        ioquatix 9y ago
        We develop server based hardware-accelerated renderers and compositors for web applications, e.g. dynamically generated product images. None of those targets are relevant. Think ImageMagick but done on hardware + 3D geometry in many cases.

I wonder what the means for Apple and their desire for Metal over Vulkan?

infinisil 9y ago

I really hope they'll catch that train, it may be their last chance to get onto tomorrows graphics stack

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
MBCook 9y ago
I think Apple has made it abundantly clear they don't care. They've never released terribly good or performant open GL drivers on OS X. My understanding is they've always been quite behind on features. Apple has an API they make that will be nice and fast and do everything they want and they can update anytime they want. And because it's the same one it's going to be used on iOS and other places it will have support and people use it. There will be tooling for it. They tried open CL and lost, along with their approach on the Mac Pro, I don't really see them going forward with it. It seems pretty clear that CUDA is what people really want right now, that's another proprietary API. I'm not sure what the big drive for having Vulcan on Apple platforms is other than to be on the "standard". That gives Apple some benefits but they don't seem to think it's worth it. I'm not entirely sure they're wrong, especially given that Apple can make an API that fits very well with their custom chip that they put in hundreds of millions of devices. The fact that Apple operates the whole stack lets them do some of the stuff they do faster than anyone else, using Vulcan wouldn't give them that.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  > The fact that Apple operates the whole stack lets them do some of the stuff they do faster than anyone else, using Vulcan wouldn't give them that. There isn't anything I'm aware of that Metal can do faster than Vulkan can. The situation is simply that Apple doesn't care, since they're invested in Metal and see no reason to switch. Developers are forced to use Metal because it's the only thing Apple supports, and Apple sees no reason to make it easier to port applications to competing platforms. This decision may or may not be a conscious effort to create lock-in, but whether malicious or not, it hurts developers like me who have to develop modern cross-platform graphics applications.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    What I was referring to there is that since Apple makes the chips (for iOS only, for now) and Apple makes the API and Apple makes the drivers (even on the Mac side) then Apple can implement new features they come up with faster than others. For example if Apple makes a new bit of the A23 chip that is designed to do some Neville feature that's not currently in Vulkan or Metal ( to make up something stupid, something that accelerates replacing colors of an image with their square roots) Apple can put it in the shading language and the driver extremely fast. They can have it ready for announcement. On the other hand with Vulkan Nvidia or someone else would have to do some other process (I'm assuming it has some sort of extension support the way OpenGL did) and it would only get standardized later, if at all. Or maybe it's not a new feature that gets exposed to developers. Maybe it's something along the lines of because Apple knows how the chips work and the shading pipeline and all that other stuff they are able to get extra information out of it to help reduce power draw where if they were using someone else's API it wouldn't be nearly as easy to glean information necessary. > This decision may or may not be a conscious effort to create lock-in, but whether malicious or not, it hurts developers like me who have to develop modern cross-platform graphics applications. My read on thing is that Apple doesn't really try to CREATE lock-in anymore, they just do what's best for Apple and that is often a side effect. It seems like a lot of cross platform stuff has gone to using intermediate frameworks (at least in gaming) so I guess they're just sort of counting on that to bridge the gap. Outside of that (professional things) I'm guessing they think they either have enough market that they can get people to follow (possibly with some help from Apple) or they just don't think it's important enough to bother with. The way Apple has been letting professionals just sort of sit there hoping for updates for a couple of years has been well documented, that may be the case here too. But like I said earlier, it's not like they ever had very good OpenGL support either. Are they treating a bad implementation of an old API for a good implementation of their own? Assuming they don't want to make a good implementation of the standard API (because obviously they don't) is that a good trade off? I don't know enough to make any reasonable guess.
    - theparanoid 9y ago
      Apparently what's best for Apple is having crappy graphics drivers. Cause that's what they have right now.

pjmlp 9y ago

Nothing. Although they created OpenCL, they lost interest in keeping it up to date long time ago. The future of OpenCL on Apple platforms is Metal Compute and I bet there is nothing at WWDC 2017 that will contradict this.

shmerl 9y ago
Metal will die out, but it till take Apple a very long time to realize it's pointless.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The market share of iOS is so tiny.

mathnode 9y ago

Metal has been out and working for two years. And working well. Apple have a graphics API. Microsoft have a graphics API. Sony have a graphics API. Nvidia have their own libraries and compilers and so do AMD.

zanny 9y ago
And developers love rewriting their graphical backends for every target platform, its the best!
- bronxbomber92 9y ago
  In reality, for most developers, it is a non-issue to bringup a new graphics API backend. See, for example, Arseny Kapoulkine's experience porting to Metal: http://zeuxcg.org/2016/12/01/metal-retrospective http://zeuxcg.org/2016/12/01/metal-retrospective
  - ioquatix 9y ago
    One example is not most developers. I'm a developer and I get paid to write hardware accelerated renderers and for the past two years I've been recommending Vulkan.. I'm exclusively using Linux these days for software development. Sometimes it's not about what you're targeting for deployment but the capabilities of the development machine. For example, I do like Xcode, but I can't use it for Vulkan development, even if my ultimate platform isn't macOS/Apple. Apple dropped the ball on Vulkan and I do hope they support it eventually.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Good luck using Vulkan on the PS, XBox or 93% of Android devices out there.
      - ioquatix 9y ago
        We develop server based hardware-accelerated renderers and compositors for web applications, e.g. dynamically generated product images. None of those targets are relevant. Think ImageMagick but done on hardware + 3D geometry in many cases.