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I 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 ga

by tomxor 7y ago

I 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 ago
APIs 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 ago
    Their most important platform uses in-house GPUs these days.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Not every developer feels like they have to support every computer in existence. Many game studios are quite happy being Apple experts, just like many other game studios release exclusives or sell themselves as experts on a given platform, including selling consulting services. For those, vendor tooling is very much appreciated. The ones that care for portable code, they also care about having the easiest way to start coding on each platform. If Khronos cares about adoption, they should improve LunarG SDK to be more than just a set of bare bones libraries.
    - tomxor 7y ago
      So in short, to answer my own question: a developer can have enthusiasm for metal if metal covers all of their target platform (Apple).

by tomxor 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

APIs 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 ago
  Their most important platform uses in-house GPUs these days.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Not every developer feels like they have to support every computer in existence. Many game studios are quite happy being Apple experts, just like many other game studios release exclusives or sell themselves as experts on a given platform, including selling consulting services. For those, vendor tooling is very much appreciated. The ones that care for portable code, they also care about having the easiest way to start coding on each platform. If Khronos cares about adoption, they should improve LunarG SDK to be more than just a set of bare bones libraries.
  - tomxor 7y ago
    So in short, to answer my own question: a developer can have enthusiasm for metal if metal covers all of their target platform (Apple).