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Yes, I find it difficult to imagine developers that are enthusiastic about "metal", I mean who wants another platform specific API for graphics cards. If Apple
by tomxor 7y ago
Yes, I find it difficult to imagine developers that are enthusiastic about "metal", I mean who wants another platform specific API for graphics cards. If Apple really think we need something other than "vulkan" then they should push to make "metal" a competing open standard- But I doubt they think that, and It's quite easy to imagine ulterior motives, M$ had exactly the same motives.
- frou_dh 7y ago> If Apple really think we need something other than "vulkan" then they should push to make "metal" a competing open standard Metal predates Vulkan by years. They were already using Metal in shipping products before Vulkan existed.
- tomxor 7y agoWhy does that mean they shouldn't make it an open standard?
- frou_dh 7y agocos randomers don't get to dictate the scope of the project after-the-fact
- tomxor 7y agoIf "randomers" are developers who are repelled by the proprietary nature of their graphics API "randomers" may well dictate the scope of the project.
- derefr 7y ago"Metal" is a vertically-integrated software stack that goes up into Objective-C runtime land. An open standard based upon it would require that there be an open-standard Objective-C runtime and toolchain to use in working with it. Unlike Vulkan, the lowest-level, C-ABI, non-type-safe parts of Metal aren't exposed as public APIs, AFAIK. You could maybe standardize those, but Apple presumably wants to reserve the right to change them while just keeping the higher-level ObjC ABI stable.
- astrange 7y ago> Unlike Vulkan, the lowest-level, C-ABI, non-type-safe parts of Metal aren't exposed as public APIs, AFAIK. They don't even really exist. Most Metal APIs are defined as protocols (id<MTL...>) for a reason; if you look at the objects you get back, they're directly implemented by the GPU driver.
- pjmlp 7y agoAll of us that rather use productive SDKs, with higher level languages, instead of a C API that only knows about drawing pixels. The same devs that rather use DirectX, libGCM, libGNM, GX, GX2, NVN.
- tomxor 7y agoI am talking about principles of openness vs lockin, I am not personally interested in technical merits until I can depend on it existing beyond Apple's back garden. My point was I am surprised others do not care about this aspect, you are obviously one example - So my question to you (as someone who values it technically) is: does this not bother you?
- pjmlp 7y agoAPIs win on technical merits and market tooling, not on feels good kind of thing. Not at all, as someone that learned to program graphics when demoscene was all the rage, it is all about taking advantage of the hardware. Professional game studios are more than used to have a thin layer to abstract each 3D API, which is a very small codebase from any game engine/middleware.
- tomxor 7y ago> APIs win on technical merits and market tooling, not on feels good kind of thing. Ok, but the technical merits for metal stop at Apple, you can abstract away differences in your translation layer if you care about your game existing outside, but you have to leave any merits of metal behind. Doesn't this dull your enthusiasm over improvements and features specific to metal? I get that the original demoscene you were using unique hardware, and unportable demos that squeezed everything they could out of that specific piece of hardware felt natural, but Apple computers use the same GPUs everyone else is using... doesn't that make a proprietary low level graphics API seem more artificial.
- frou_dh 7y agoTheir most important platform uses in-house GPUs these days.
- flohofwoe 7y agoI'm quite enthusiastic about Metal, and I'm not even much of an Apple fan. Compared to Vulkan or even OpenGL, Metal's API design is much more elegant and developer-friendly. It can be used just fine without a "sanity layer", which can't be said about Vulkan.