6 ms·

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.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Oh, I was really hoping that we were having a discussion about the historical reasons why Metal and DX12 exist. Complaining about how evil Apple and Microsoft are was fun and all in the 1990s when I was a kid hanging out on Slashdot, but I'm just kinda bored of it now.
        shmerl 5y ago
        Whitewashing lock-in doesn't make your arguments sound any more reasonable. It was bad in the '90s and it is bad today ;)

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.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Oh, I was really hoping that we were having a discussion about the historical reasons why Metal and DX12 exist. Complaining about how evil Apple and Microsoft are was fun and all in the 1990s when I was a kid hanging out on Slashdot, but I'm just kinda bored of it now.
        shmerl 5y ago
        Whitewashing lock-in doesn't make your arguments sound any more reasonable. It was bad in the '90s and it is bad today ;)