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It’s kind of sad that Apple and the Khronos Group diverted here. Apple pushes Metal and has thus far not shown any interest in supporting Vulkan. It would be ni
by hit8run 9y ago
It’s kind of sad that Apple and the Khronos Group diverted here. Apple pushes Metal and has thus far not shown any interest in supporting Vulkan. It would be nice for the industry to have a stable well maintained common denominator for all platforms.
- pjmlp 9y agoFOSS people like to single out Apple, when the reality is Apple, Nintendo (Switch main API is NVN), Sony and Microsoft (Vulkan is desktop only). And game devs don't care because they already have their own middleware.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoI hear there's an automatic translator for Dx12 as well, not just Metal. This should cover the Microsoft consoles, shouldn't it?
- vetinari 9y agoFOSS people like to single out Apple, because it is the only company that ships desktop and mobile OSes that ignore Vulkan. You won't find much FOSS software on Nintendo, Playstation or Xbox, and for the respective middlewares porting to their respective 3d apis is cost of business.
- pjmlp 9y agoMicrosoft ships also desktop and mobile OSes that ignore Vulkan. Vulkan works only on desktop thanks to the same ICD model as OpenGL, which isn't currently supported on UWP.
- vetinari 9y agoMicrosoft doesn't make the GPU drivers and the vendors are free to support any API they want, at least under Win32. Frankly, nobody cares about UWP and nobody cares about Microsoft mobile OSes. Their usage is lower than deskto BSD.
- pjmlp 9y agoUWP is the way forward, like it or not. One day those Windows 7/8.x licenses will expire. Yesterday's Windows Developer day was once again all about the store, IoT and new AI frameworks. Surfaces and hybrid laptops are also mobile OSes in a certain way.
- vetinari 9y agoMicrosoft, during last 20 years, had many APIs that were the future. They were deprecated slightly later. The licenses won't expire; the support will stop. UWP is not automatic successor, many apps are on Windows because of Win32 and that nobody wants to rewrite decades worth of code. Kill that and you kill Windows.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Strom 9y ago> UWP is the way forward, like it or not. In Microsoft's plans perhaps. I don't know of a single person, offline or online, who uses UWP. I've seen some UWP apps benchmarked by magazines, that's about it.
- pjmlp 9y agoAnecdote data. I also have anecdote data from our customers doing UWP ports.
- floatboth 9y agoWho cares about "main API"? Switch supports Vulkan, even got a certification: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products#submission_129 https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...
- pjmlp 9y agoAAA game developers that actually produce games for the platform. The PS 3 also had OpenGL ES 1.0 with Cg shaders as secondary API, no one cared.
- R3BiRtH 9y agoOpenGL ES on the PS3 was an extemely bad implementation of an already high level api that would make no sense to use on a platform like the PS3, due to how suboptimal it is in quality, and how it's design (as OGL ES) sucks for abstracting performance in comparison. Vulkan on the switch isn't a suboptimal implementation at all. It's the same Vulkan implementation provided by Nvidia (this is indicated by Ryan C. Gordon, who ported SDL2 to the switch, and subsequently ported the Vulkan and OpenGL support). That is a first class implementation, in regards to features and support, unlike OpenGL ES for the ps3. Plus, Vulkan as a low level api works best for abstracting performance, even more so with the features it has for abstracting perf out of mobile hardware like the switch has (such as for example, render subpasses).