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It's still an unnecessary mess driven by lock-in interests. MS and Apple should have collaborated on supporting Vulkan instead and made whatever higher level st

by shmerl 5y ago

It's still an unnecessary mess driven by lock-in interests. MS and Apple should have collaborated on supporting Vulkan instead and made whatever higher level stuff on top of it already. But you are right, translating DX12 to Vulkan is easier than translating DX9 or DX11 to it.

klodolph 5y ago
Lock-in was the end result, but the project that eventually resulted in Vulkan hadn't even begun by the time Metal was shipping to developers. Metal was released June 2014, and a project called "OpenGL Next" was started the next month, in July 2014. This project was eventually renamed Vulkan, and wasn't available until February 2016. You can say that the lock-in is "unnecessary", but these things happen for complicated reasons. Fixing the lock-in isn't just a switch you can flip. We can dream about a world in which Vulkan came out two years earlier than it did. In the world we live in, Microsoft wanted migration paths for existing DirectX users, and Apple wanted people to take iOS seriously as a platform for developing games. Waiting for OpenGL Next to materialize seemed like a losing game at the time. When Metal and DirectX 12 were under developement, they weren't competing with Vulkan... they were competing with a set of techniques for OpenGL called AZDO, and it seemed that OpenGL was lagging further and further behind its alternatives with every passing year.
- ben-schaaf 5y ago
  Vulkan is derived from AMD's Mantle API which came out back in 2013.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Yes, and Mantle is a vendor-specific (AMD only) API which only supported one platform (Windows). There were plans to port it to Linux, but there were never any plans to support other GPUs. That, and Mantle ran on desktop GPUs. Metal was initially targeted at where the gap between API and hardware was the largest, which was mobile GPUs. At least with desktop OpenGL you had the "AZDO" techniques, but on mobile, you had OpenGL ES. Mobile GPUs aren't just smaller versions of desktop GPUs, they use radically different ways of drawing on the screen (although this gap is narrowing, as desktop GPUs are becoming more like mobile GPUs... basically, expect to see tiled rendering on desktops in the future). If you were living in 2013, would you say, "Gee, I hope someone else forms a committee to adapt Mantle into something which, in the future, maybe in 2016, I could theoretically use?" Or is it faster to make your own API? Or perhaps you like working with cross-platform steering committees that were, at the time, falling behind and failing to address problems with their APIs?
    - jhasse 5y ago
      I would help the committee.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        Yes, and that's what they did. They were on the committee, helping out. Seems a lot of people have kind of rewritten the narrative here. Or maybe people forgot that committees & steering groups sometimes fall apart, slow to a crawl, or deliver standards that either aren't useful to developers or aren't feasible for implementers. You'd be a moron to put all your hopes and dreams in a committee / industry working group delivering something to fix the problems with your platform. Sending more engineers to a committee that's already moving slowly will just slow things down further. So these companies, while sitting on the committee, worked on alternatives and had backup strategies. Those strategies turned into Metal and DirectX 12, and the committee realized, "Oh, if we don't fix the problems with OpenGL, it will become completely irrelevant." So, in response to this new competition, the OpenGL steering committee started working on OpenGL Next, which later became Vulkan, and about two years later, got released. It's amazing what a little competition can do.
        shmerl 5y ago
        Still makes no sense. Vulkan exists. Where are Apple and MS now? They have no excuse not supporting it.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Why doesn't the excuse, "It costs more money to support multiple graphics APIs" make sense? Or how about, "Let's keep graphics APIs stable?"
        shmerl 5y ago
        That doesn't make lock-in any better and less of a crooked practice. MS execs actually quite explicitly verbalized the idea of it in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_... This applies here very well too.
- shmerl 5y ago
  > When Metal and DirectX 12 were under development, they weren't competing with Vulkan. For huge monsters like MS and Apple the argument of "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense. They very well can join it and scrap their NIH in the process. They even did that in the past, when their NIH didn't manage to cement itself (anyone remembers ActiveX today?). Plus, in this case the idea of common low level GPU API existed before Vulkan was out, namely in Mantle. AMD proposed to collaborate on it to everyone. Which indeed resulted in Vulkan eventually. So they totally could back that instead of pushing their own stuff (that's besides the fact that MS literally used same Mantle for making DX12). So I don't see them being random bystanders here, but rather someone who deliberately refused to collaborate.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    > "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense But the argument "we already have this, so why spend money on that other thing" makes sense, especially if they profit from it and don't pay the bill for it (the companies of non MS devs which have to handle that mess do).
  - klodolph 5y ago
    > For huge monsters like MS and Apple the argument of "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense. It sounds like there’s a misunderstanding here about what Mantle was. Mantle was not a collaborative effort that different vendors could join in on. Mantle was AMD’s pet project. AMD saying “Hey, why doesn’t everyone use Mantle?” was a non-starter, because as it was, Mantle reflected the architecture of current AMD GPUs. Nvidia or other GPUs would be at a massive disadvantage trying to implement a low-level API that just didn’t fit their architecture right. However, there was indeed a collaborative effort that Apple and Microsoft were a part of. It was the OpenGL steering committee. In 2013, the steering committee was not busy making Vulkan reality. They were instead trying to fix the problems with OpenGL. The more serious problems—the reasons why Vulkan exists—never actually got fixed. This was not a massive surprise. The issues were complicated, and most people thought that OpenGL was falling behind DirectX further each year. > Which indeed resulted in Vulkan eventually. Yeah, in 2016. By that point, developers had been using Metal for almost TWO YEARS and shipping games with it. Some of those games had shipped sequels or spinoffs. The project which eventually resulted in Vulkan, called “OpenGL Next,” hadn’t even BEGUN by the time Metal was released to developers. DirectX 12, I assume, was under heavy development at the time. The story I’ve heard was that the release of Metal was a real kick in the pants for what became the Vulkan effort. If you were to go back in time and rewrite history, and wipe Metal off the face of the planet, who knows what would happen to Vulkan? History is messy.

by shmerl 5y ago

klodolph 5y ago

Lock-in was the end result, but the project that eventually resulted in Vulkan hadn't even begun by the time Metal was shipping to developers. Metal was released June 2014, and a project called "OpenGL Next" was started the next month, in July 2014. This project was eventually renamed Vulkan, and wasn't available until February 2016. You can say that the lock-in is "unnecessary", but these things happen for complicated reasons. Fixing the lock-in isn't just a switch you can flip. We can dream about a world in which Vulkan came out two years earlier than it did. In the world we live in, Microsoft wanted migration paths for existing DirectX users, and Apple wanted people to take iOS seriously as a platform for developing games. Waiting for OpenGL Next to materialize seemed like a losing game at the time. When Metal and DirectX 12 were under developement, they weren't competing with Vulkan... they were competing with a set of techniques for OpenGL called AZDO, and it seemed that OpenGL was lagging further and further behind its alternatives with every passing year.

ben-schaaf 5y ago
Vulkan is derived from AMD's Mantle API which came out back in 2013.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Yes, and Mantle is a vendor-specific (AMD only) API which only supported one platform (Windows). There were plans to port it to Linux, but there were never any plans to support other GPUs. That, and Mantle ran on desktop GPUs. Metal was initially targeted at where the gap between API and hardware was the largest, which was mobile GPUs. At least with desktop OpenGL you had the "AZDO" techniques, but on mobile, you had OpenGL ES. Mobile GPUs aren't just smaller versions of desktop GPUs, they use radically different ways of drawing on the screen (although this gap is narrowing, as desktop GPUs are becoming more like mobile GPUs... basically, expect to see tiled rendering on desktops in the future). If you were living in 2013, would you say, "Gee, I hope someone else forms a committee to adapt Mantle into something which, in the future, maybe in 2016, I could theoretically use?" Or is it faster to make your own API? Or perhaps you like working with cross-platform steering committees that were, at the time, falling behind and failing to address problems with their APIs?
  - jhasse 5y ago
    I would help the committee.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Yes, and that's what they did. They were on the committee, helping out. Seems a lot of people have kind of rewritten the narrative here. Or maybe people forgot that committees & steering groups sometimes fall apart, slow to a crawl, or deliver standards that either aren't useful to developers or aren't feasible for implementers. You'd be a moron to put all your hopes and dreams in a committee / industry working group delivering something to fix the problems with your platform. Sending more engineers to a committee that's already moving slowly will just slow things down further. So these companies, while sitting on the committee, worked on alternatives and had backup strategies. Those strategies turned into Metal and DirectX 12, and the committee realized, "Oh, if we don't fix the problems with OpenGL, it will become completely irrelevant." So, in response to this new competition, the OpenGL steering committee started working on OpenGL Next, which later became Vulkan, and about two years later, got released. It's amazing what a little competition can do.
      - shmerl 5y ago
        Still makes no sense. Vulkan exists. Where are Apple and MS now? They have no excuse not supporting it.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Why doesn't the excuse, "It costs more money to support multiple graphics APIs" make sense? Or how about, "Let's keep graphics APIs stable?"
        shmerl 5y ago
        That doesn't make lock-in any better and less of a crooked practice. MS execs actually quite explicitly verbalized the idea of it in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_... This applies here very well too.
shmerl 5y ago
> When Metal and DirectX 12 were under development, they weren't competing with Vulkan. For huge monsters like MS and Apple the argument of "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense. They very well can join it and scrap their NIH in the process. They even did that in the past, when their NIH didn't manage to cement itself (anyone remembers ActiveX today?). Plus, in this case the idea of common low level GPU API existed before Vulkan was out, namely in Mantle. AMD proposed to collaborate on it to everyone. Which indeed resulted in Vulkan eventually. So they totally could back that instead of pushing their own stuff (that's besides the fact that MS literally used same Mantle for making DX12). So I don't see them being random bystanders here, but rather someone who deliberately refused to collaborate.
- dathinab 5y ago
  > "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense But the argument "we already have this, so why spend money on that other thing" makes sense, especially if they profit from it and don't pay the bill for it (the companies of non MS devs which have to handle that mess do).
- klodolph 5y ago
  > For huge monsters like MS and Apple the argument of "we already had this, so we can't join the collaborative effort" doesn't really make sense. It sounds like there’s a misunderstanding here about what Mantle was. Mantle was not a collaborative effort that different vendors could join in on. Mantle was AMD’s pet project. AMD saying “Hey, why doesn’t everyone use Mantle?” was a non-starter, because as it was, Mantle reflected the architecture of current AMD GPUs. Nvidia or other GPUs would be at a massive disadvantage trying to implement a low-level API that just didn’t fit their architecture right. However, there was indeed a collaborative effort that Apple and Microsoft were a part of. It was the OpenGL steering committee. In 2013, the steering committee was not busy making Vulkan reality. They were instead trying to fix the problems with OpenGL. The more serious problems—the reasons why Vulkan exists—never actually got fixed. This was not a massive surprise. The issues were complicated, and most people thought that OpenGL was falling behind DirectX further each year. > Which indeed resulted in Vulkan eventually. Yeah, in 2016. By that point, developers had been using Metal for almost TWO YEARS and shipping games with it. Some of those games had shipped sequels or spinoffs. The project which eventually resulted in Vulkan, called “OpenGL Next,” hadn’t even BEGUN by the time Metal was released to developers. DirectX 12, I assume, was under heavy development at the time. The story I’ve heard was that the release of Metal was a real kick in the pants for what became the Vulkan effort. If you were to go back in time and rewrite history, and wipe Metal off the face of the planet, who knows what would happen to Vulkan? History is messy.