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It won't matter since Metal was released in 2014 and Vulkan in 2016 including OpenCL will be merged into Vulkan API. If most developers are targeting iOS and m

by proyb2 9y ago

It won't matter since Metal was released in 2014 and Vulkan in 2016 including OpenCL will be merged into Vulkan API. If most developers are targeting iOS and macOS for gaming, it make sense to use game engines, if I understand some developers had shared their discussion in /r/vulkan found it was harder to code in Vulkan than Metal 2?

santaclaus 9y ago
> If most developers are targeting iOS and macOS for gaming There are applications beyond gaming, however, and it is still kind of a drag that OpenGL is still the only de facto cross platform API in the space, and that it has miserable support on macOS.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  What are the prospects of just wrapping OpenGL on top of Metal? Genuinely curious, since I haven't taken a deep look at Metal yet and have kind of been out of the 3D graphics biz for some time now.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    It's happening, and that's basically the future of OpenGL (a library on top of Vulkan / DirectX 12 / Metal). It will be a while, though.
    - mbel 9y ago
      > It's happening Are you aware of any project that is under development right now? I know it's theoretically possible, but I haven't seen any implementation yet.
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        A quick search points to a commercial project: MoltenGL[1] (I'm not affiliated with them at all, just googling). 1: https://moltengl.com https://moltengl.com
abritinthebay 9y ago
Speaking from personal experience - hobbies only - that sounds about right. Vulkan is not very nice to work with. It's.. ok. Metal is nicer
- pjmlp 9y ago
  A very nice thing about Metal is that the API is OO, targeted at Objective-C and Swift, with the shaders being a subset of C++14. Khronos APIs keep being stuck on their C API definitions, it was NVidia effort to create a C++ wrapper that eventually made it into Vulkan, yet the shading language is pretty bare bones. Similarly with Metal Compute shaders, Khronos had to see CUDAs and C++AMP adoption to see that many wanted something more productive than OpenCL C. However not many boards do support OpenCL 2.2 with SYCL.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Right - higher-level interfaces are usually nicer to work with, be that at a language level or abstraction level. Metal is a nice balance.

by proyb2 9y ago

santaclaus 9y ago

> If most developers are targeting iOS and macOS for gaming There are applications beyond gaming, however, and it is still kind of a drag that OpenGL is still the only de facto cross platform API in the space, and that it has miserable support on macOS.

ryandrake 9y ago
What are the prospects of just wrapping OpenGL on top of Metal? Genuinely curious, since I haven't taken a deep look at Metal yet and have kind of been out of the 3D graphics biz for some time now.
- klodolph 9y ago
  It's happening, and that's basically the future of OpenGL (a library on top of Vulkan / DirectX 12 / Metal). It will be a while, though.
  - mbel 9y ago
    > It's happening Are you aware of any project that is under development right now? I know it's theoretically possible, but I haven't seen any implementation yet.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      A quick search points to a commercial project: MoltenGL[1] (I'm not affiliated with them at all, just googling). 1: https://moltengl.com https://moltengl.com

abritinthebay 9y ago

Speaking from personal experience - hobbies only - that sounds about right. Vulkan is not very nice to work with. It's.. ok. Metal is nicer

pjmlp 9y ago
A very nice thing about Metal is that the API is OO, targeted at Objective-C and Swift, with the shaders being a subset of C++14. Khronos APIs keep being stuck on their C API definitions, it was NVidia effort to create a C++ wrapper that eventually made it into Vulkan, yet the shading language is pretty bare bones. Similarly with Metal Compute shaders, Khronos had to see CUDAs and C++AMP adoption to see that many wanted something more productive than OpenCL C. However not many boards do support OpenCL 2.2 with SYCL.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Right - higher-level interfaces are usually nicer to work with, be that at a language level or abstraction level. Metal is a nice balance.