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Metal is racing against Vulkin as well, because Apple needed to have their own standard they owned. Except Metal has zero support outside of Apple products. B
by kevin_b_er 7y ago
Metal is racing against Vulkin as well, because Apple needed to have their own standard they owned. Except Metal has zero support outside of Apple products.
Besides, what Metal represents is Apple's attempt to have yet another vector for their infamous walled garden and vendor lock-in strategies.
Further, the article and the website are intentionally and blatently biased.
Quotes like this showcase their extreme bias:
> One can be righteously indignant that Apple isn't subsidizing everyone else with support for their platforms, whether CUDA, Vulkan, or even Android. But such emotions won't have any bearing on the final outcome of who wins and who loses in the market for developing and commercializing the graphics technology of the future.
The absolute derisiveness of open standards coupled with their insults against those that would showcases quite well the position of the article, its authors, and the website itself.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThat was the same paragraph I stopped on and thought, “How biased is this?” All mentions of the machine learning efforts seemed vague, as well. That was the main reason for me for reading the article.
- reaperducer 7y agoFurther, the article and the website are intentionally and blatently biased Seems like an unnecessary criticism. It's an Apple fan blog, not journalism. Nobody is going to Apple Insider for balanced information about tech trends.
- BryantD 7y agoAppleInsider is really excessively biased, even for an Apple-focused site. I'm an Apple user from way back and I rarely find their opinion pieces useful.
- symfoniq 7y agoI agree. At first glance, they serve the same niche, but in reality there is a huge difference in credibility between AppleInsider and MacRumors. (I don't have a relationship with either site.)
- jonas21 7y ago> Nobody is going to Apple Insider for balanced information about tech trends. Many people are going to click on an HN link and assume it's a reasonably objective technical source. I didn't realize it was an Apple fan blog until I was well into the article.
- scarface74 7y agoThe name of the site "Apple Insider" didn't give it away?
- bitwize 7y agoI like to think the average Hackernews is a bit more savvy than to assume all or even most links here are objective. Still, there's no harm in saying "yo dawg, this article has an agenda, so just be aware of that when you read."
- gowld 7y agoSorry if I don't know the background of every website on the Internet. There are a lot of people who use an Apple computer because they were the best choice at the time they purchased the computer, and might even have non-Apple computers they'd like to use also, not because they've been baptized at the Church of Jobs to fight in the Cook army to defend the motherland and conquert the rest of the world.
- kevin_b_er 7y agoIt isn't just that it was biased, but ridiculously so. It is sycophantic enough to make one wonder if it was a press release if I didn't know better that Apple the corporation wouldn't be writing these. The praise is lavish enough and thin on substance to make it offensive to the taste if you were expecting any kind of real substance on Metal or direction for it.
- kec 7y agoMetal predates vulkan by over two years. If anything vulkan is a response to it, not the other way around.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoAlso, Vulkan is quickly becoming the lingua franca of graphics APIs. Vulkan can be implemented on top of Metal, which means that developers have next to no reason to implement Metal directly.
- xvilka 7y agoMoreover, it is even implemented[1] by the Khronos Group itself. [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
- bsder 7y agoActually, it's Valve paying the bills for the MoltenVK guy so that MoltenVK is part of Khronos. Basically, Valve is saying: "OS X is a completely useless environment but has lots of people who spend more money than Windows users. So, we can make lots of money if we can maintain one codebase by writing a shim wrapper even if we have to eat performance."
- dogma1138 7y agoOn which platform exactly? It’s also important to note that Vulkan at this point is as fragmented as OpenGL as far as extension support coverage goes.
- Someone 7y agoPerformance could be a reason. It’s highly likely that implementing a low level graphics API on top of another low-level graphics API will have some performance gotchas here and there.
- ogre_codes 7y agoYes, AppleInsider is totally biased. But the competition here is not "Open Standards", it's CUDA, which is Nvidia's own proprietary standard. There is no Open Standard which has any kind of market share. The claim that Apple is against Open Standards is a bit misleading in this case. Apple invested a lot of money and spent years pushing Open Standards in this market in the form of OpenCL... the open standard which Nvidia refused to support and in general the industry ignored. Apple is no angel and in many other places they've ignore standards, but in this case, there have been standards around for years and both the competition and the market have largely ignored them. Singling out Apple here is just wrong.
- theossuary 7y agoIsn't Vulkan the open-source specification they're ignoring in favor of their own?
- GeekyBear 7y agoMetal and Mantle were both proprietary frameworks that were in development at the same time. AMD announced the existence of Mantle at their Developer Summit in November 2013. Apple announced Metal at WWDC the following June and shipped it that fall. By the time AMD donated their Mantle code to Khronos to serve as the basis for Vulkan, Apple had already shipped Metal.
- vetinari 7y ago> By the time AMD donated their Mantle code to Khronos to serve as the basis for Vulkan, Apple had already shipped Metal. Metal v1 was so woefully incomplete, AMD was in no position to ship something similarly limited. Vulkan 1.0 is functionally similar to Metal v2, which shipped several months after Vulkan 1.0.
- ogre_codes 7y agoWhen you say "They" do you mean Nvidia, the market, or Apple?
- bilbo0s 7y ago>Metal is racing against Vulkin as well, because Apple needed to have their own standard they owned. Wait? What? I'm pretty sure Metal was around long before Vulkan? I think it would be more accurate to say that Apple and MS should switch to Vulkan.
- pjmlp 7y agoApparently everyone keeps forgetting Sony.
- jayd16 7y agoNot exactly. Its probably more accurate to say Apple wasn't willing to wait for Vulkan to be shippable and made their own. Metal, Vulkan, Mantle and DX12 are all part of the same industry wide movement.
- qplex 7y agoMantle was released before Metal. I think it's worth noting that Mantle was proprietary, and Vulkan is an open standard that was later spinned off it.
- 7y ago
- scarface74 7y agoCUDA is not an "open standard"