4 ms·

Doesn’t each OS simply provide a high quality and constantly supported API locked to the OS? And leave it to third parties to map any other standards on to it?

Doesn’t each OS simply provide a high quality and constantly supported API locked to the OS? And leave it to third parties to map any other standards on to it? It seems like DirectX is to Windows what Metal is to macOS - they’re both locked, supported and optimised around the same, no? Nobody is expecting Microsoft to add native Vulkan drivers on Windows, why would that be expected of Apple?

kllrnohj 9y ago
> Nobody is expecting Microsoft to add native Vulkan drivers on Windows, why would that be expected of Apple? Windows has modern, fast OpenGL & Vulkan support due to Windows allowing IHVs (nvidia & amd) to supply the implementation through the Installable Client Driver model ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/loading-an-opengl-installable-client-driver https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... ), which they do. It's why AAA games have already shipped Vulkan and performed superbly with it (Doom, DOTA2, etc...), since they work with the IHVs to tune & fix bugs and then ship the driver update along with the game drop. Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan or OpenGL, yet they also are not blocking them. That's the critical difference here. Why is Apple not allowing Nvidia or AMD to do the same on macOS? It's not a question of not supporting it out of the box or doing the work, it's a question of preventing others from supporting it.
- GeekyBear 9y ago
  Nvidia and AMD didn't take over supporting OpenGL when Microsoft abandoned it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did so because they were in a highly competitive marketplace and supporting OpenGL was a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, on the Mac, the cheese grater Mac Pro is the only model you can install their graphics cards into and it exited production half a decade ago. The problem isn't that MacOS lacks Kernel Extensions. The question is why should Nvidia or ATI take on the expense when there is no marketplace to compete in.
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    They both have competitive Linux drivers which has even less market share. Given how little kernel-specific is even in the driver I don't see any reason to believe Nvidia or AMD wouldn't happily provide their latest and greatest driver. Especially since they are competing for that bid for whose GPU Apple blesses for that generation of Mac hardware.
    - GeekyBear 9y ago
      You can buy their graphics cards and plug them into a computer running Linux, say in a render farm. The only Mac you can purchase and use their products in exited production half a decade ago. Without the possibility of making sales, why would they bother? Apple's pro software made a big bet on OpenCL in the past, so I don't see them going with anybody but ATI for built in GPUs until they root that dependency out of their software and switch over to Metal for compute. Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance, so I can't see them getting a design win with Apple as long as Apple's in house software is still using OpenCL.
      - kllrnohj 9y ago
        > Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080-OpenCL-vs-CUDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080... OpenCL performs great on Nvidia.
        GeekyBear 9y ago
        Perhaps so, but they haven't seen a design win for a discrete GPU on the Mac since 2013 for the iMac, and 2014 for the Macbook Pro. That happens to be not terribly long after Apple started offering rewrites of their pro apps that went all in on OpenCL. Nvidia did put out a driver for the cheese grater Mac pro so it can use Pascal based cards, which is nice, but I imagine that's motivated by a desire to maintain CUDA dominance.

kllrnohj 9y ago

> Nobody is expecting Microsoft to add native Vulkan drivers on Windows, why would that be expected of Apple? Windows has modern, fast OpenGL & Vulkan support due to Windows allowing IHVs (nvidia & amd) to supply the implementation through the Installable Client Driver model ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/loading-an-opengl-installable-client-driver https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... ), which they do. It's why AAA games have already shipped Vulkan and performed superbly with it (Doom, DOTA2, etc...), since they work with the IHVs to tune & fix bugs and then ship the driver update along with the game drop. Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan or OpenGL, yet they also are not blocking them. That's the critical difference here. Why is Apple not allowing Nvidia or AMD to do the same on macOS? It's not a question of not supporting it out of the box or doing the work, it's a question of preventing others from supporting it.

GeekyBear 9y ago
Nvidia and AMD didn't take over supporting OpenGL when Microsoft abandoned it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did so because they were in a highly competitive marketplace and supporting OpenGL was a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, on the Mac, the cheese grater Mac Pro is the only model you can install their graphics cards into and it exited production half a decade ago. The problem isn't that MacOS lacks Kernel Extensions. The question is why should Nvidia or ATI take on the expense when there is no marketplace to compete in.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  They both have competitive Linux drivers which has even less market share. Given how little kernel-specific is even in the driver I don't see any reason to believe Nvidia or AMD wouldn't happily provide their latest and greatest driver. Especially since they are competing for that bid for whose GPU Apple blesses for that generation of Mac hardware.
  - GeekyBear 9y ago
    You can buy their graphics cards and plug them into a computer running Linux, say in a render farm. The only Mac you can purchase and use their products in exited production half a decade ago. Without the possibility of making sales, why would they bother? Apple's pro software made a big bet on OpenCL in the past, so I don't see them going with anybody but ATI for built in GPUs until they root that dependency out of their software and switch over to Metal for compute. Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance, so I can't see them getting a design win with Apple as long as Apple's in house software is still using OpenCL.
    - kllrnohj 9y ago
      > Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080-OpenCL-vs-CUDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080... OpenCL performs great on Nvidia.
      - GeekyBear 9y ago
        Perhaps so, but they haven't seen a design win for a discrete GPU on the Mac since 2013 for the iMac, and 2014 for the Macbook Pro. That happens to be not terribly long after Apple started offering rewrites of their pro apps that went all in on OpenCL. Nvidia did put out a driver for the cheese grater Mac pro so it can use Pascal based cards, which is nice, but I imagine that's motivated by a desire to maintain CUDA dominance.