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It’s too bad, Metal has gotten very good. Blizzard ported the Mac versions of their games over to Metal a couple years ago and has been riding up against the ed

It’s too bad, Metal has gotten very good. Blizzard ported the Mac versions of their games over to Metal a couple years ago and has been riding up against the edge of what’s possible with Metal. As of the latest WoW update, Metal performance is ridiculously good — barely distinguishable from DX12 under Windows on the same hardware. It’s amazing, I’ve never seen any game run this well under macOS. This may have been achievable with OpenGL, but I have doubts. Should Apple have waited for Vulkan to be finished up before making their choice of modern graphics API in iOS + macOS? Maybe, but if they had, their Vulkan implementation wouldn’t have been as mature as Metal is now and the existence of MoltenVK renders the whole thing moot anyway. Which makes me wonder, why not consider porting Alias to Vulkan? I’m not sure that OpenGL has much of a future on any platform, now that most everything will be written for DX12, Vulkan, or Metal. At best, frozen-in-time support for it will remain in Windows and Linux for a few more years, but I don’t see it being developed any further... didn’t Apple just jump ahead to OpenGL’s inevitable conclusion?

vetinari 8y ago
OpenGL AZDO is conceptually very near to Vulkan and DX12. Few years ago, I had an impression that Nvidia wanted to go this route, instead of Vulkan, if for nothing else then just to make advantage of their investment into OpenGL. However, AZDO is unusable on macOS; the OpenGL on macOS is too limited to support it. Khronos with OpenGL 4.6 made another step towards Vulkan: SPIR-V shaders. If Apple implemented 4.6, they could go all they way and implement Vulkan too. Apple, while they released the Metal 1 first, it was quite limited and there were reasons why the release was iOS only. When they came with Metal 2, which could compete with Vulkan, Vulkan was out for a year already. So basically they rushed to come with API, that would be exclusive to their platform and lock their developers in. There's no other use for Metal today.

vetinari 8y ago

OpenGL AZDO is conceptually very near to Vulkan and DX12. Few years ago, I had an impression that Nvidia wanted to go this route, instead of Vulkan, if for nothing else then just to make advantage of their investment into OpenGL. However, AZDO is unusable on macOS; the OpenGL on macOS is too limited to support it. Khronos with OpenGL 4.6 made another step towards Vulkan: SPIR-V shaders. If Apple implemented 4.6, they could go all they way and implement Vulkan too. Apple, while they released the Metal 1 first, it was quite limited and there were reasons why the release was iOS only. When they came with Metal 2, which could compete with Vulkan, Vulkan was out for a year already. So basically they rushed to come with API, that would be exclusive to their platform and lock their developers in. There's no other use for Metal today.