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Apple is making its own hardware (GPUs) and wants full control on the drivers and feature set for their graphics API. As someone else mentioned, Vulkan and co

Apple is making its own hardware (GPUs) and wants full control on the drivers and feature set for their graphics API. As someone else mentioned, Vulkan and co are great but also limit to some extent what you can achieve / implement on a given hardware for the sake of cross platform.

jheriko 9y ago
When did Apple start making hardware exactly? It’s not their design at least so far ... afaik. That’s when this matters
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Apple was basically the top buyer of Imagination GPUs for years, and worked very closely with them. Last year they severed ties and made the GPUs in-house.
- djrogers 9y ago
  Not sure why people are simply downvoting you without answering your question. Apple shipped its first in-house GPU with the A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8/8+/X, and by all accounts it’s a marvel of engineering and quite fantastic for a first outing. And you’re right - a look at the developer docs for Metal do show that ‘this matters’ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a-custom-gpu-designed-by-apple-with-its-new-a11-bionic-chip/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a-cus... [2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/about_gpu_family_4 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/about_gpu_fa...
- GeekyBear 9y ago
  Apple built its own custom GPU core starting with the iPhone 6 — and nobody noticed https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/238246-apple-built-its-own-custom-gpu-core-starting-with-the-iphone-6-and-nobody-noticed https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/238246-apple-built-its-ow...
johncolanduoni 9y ago
95% of the time Vulcan exposes much more low level detail than Metal. A good example is that Vulkan requires you manually lay out buffers/textures in GPU memory, while Metal only lets you bin them into heaps. Vulkan also requires much more manual synchronization. Vulkan also exposes a lot of features (conventional tesselation shaders, geometry shaders) that Metal lacks. Metal’s main advantage is that it lets you adopt more manual management incrementally (you can basically use it as a DX11 analogue if you’re not interested in low level performance gains). Vulkan is definitely intended primarily for engine developers, not for one-off games.
- AHTERIX5000 9y ago
  You are correct about Vulkan being higher level API than Metal in general but there are still Apple-specific functionality in Metal. For example when they released A11 Metal was augmented with a new shading stage intended to match HWs tiled rendering.

jheriko 9y ago

When did Apple start making hardware exactly? It’s not their design at least so far ... afaik. That’s when this matters

saagarjha 9y ago
Apple was basically the top buyer of Imagination GPUs for years, and worked very closely with them. Last year they severed ties and made the GPUs in-house.
djrogers 9y ago
Not sure why people are simply downvoting you without answering your question. Apple shipped its first in-house GPU with the A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8/8+/X, and by all accounts it’s a marvel of engineering and quite fantastic for a first outing. And you’re right - a look at the developer docs for Metal do show that ‘this matters’ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a-custom-gpu-designed-by-apple-with-its-new-a11-bionic-chip/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a-cus... [2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/about_gpu_family_4 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/about_gpu_fa...
GeekyBear 9y ago
Apple built its own custom GPU core starting with the iPhone 6 — and nobody noticed https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/238246-apple-built-its-own-custom-gpu-core-starting-with-the-iphone-6-and-nobody-noticed https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/238246-apple-built-its-ow...

johncolanduoni 9y ago

95% of the time Vulcan exposes much more low level detail than Metal. A good example is that Vulkan requires you manually lay out buffers/textures in GPU memory, while Metal only lets you bin them into heaps. Vulkan also requires much more manual synchronization. Vulkan also exposes a lot of features (conventional tesselation shaders, geometry shaders) that Metal lacks. Metal’s main advantage is that it lets you adopt more manual management incrementally (you can basically use it as a DX11 analogue if you’re not interested in low level performance gains). Vulkan is definitely intended primarily for engine developers, not for one-off games.

AHTERIX5000 9y ago
You are correct about Vulkan being higher level API than Metal in general but there are still Apple-specific functionality in Metal. For example when they released A11 Metal was augmented with a new shading stage intended to match HWs tiled rendering.