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I don't know why we have to keep having this discussion but Metal pre-dates Vulkan. It shipped to developers in June 2014. Vulkan didn't ship until Feb 2016. M

I don't know why we have to keep having this discussion but Metal pre-dates Vulkan. It shipped to developers in June 2014. Vulkan didn't ship until Feb 2016. Metal is the reason Vulkan exists: Apple announced Metal in June 2014 and the first Khronos meeting about a replacement for OpenGL was hosted at Valve in July 2014 so they could rush to announce an "open standard" under development at SIGGRAPH later that year. The only reason it managed to ship a final spec in 2016 was because AMD donated Mantle to boot-strap the process. When you make your own GPUs and have sufficient scale to get developer adoption owning your own API can let you move much faster than others while avoiding vendor extension hell (that turns into a bespoke API-within-an-API at the extreme end). Besides which MoltenVK effectively allows Vulkan software to run against Metal anyway. In that sense it's also better for Vulkan because it can ship API updates whenever Khronos feels like it.

hvis 5y ago
> Metal is the reason Vulkan exists That seems to give way too little credit to Mantle. Which was released in 2013 and became the basis for Vulkan.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  Please re-read my parent comment. A few weeks after Apple announced Metal at WWDC Khronos members met for the first time ever to kickoff then project to replace OpenGL. I don't believe that is a coincidence. Maybe Metal was the straw that broke the Camel's back, maybe not. I also noted that AMD donated Mantle as the starting point which is why Vulkan didn't take 5 years to finalize. In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense.
  - hvis 5y ago
    > Please re-read my parent comment. I just said that it's severely overstating the case. > In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense. Why not? They could have adopted Mantle instead, for example. It came out a year earlier. Or it could have replaced Metal with Vulkan later (as it is often a reasonable choice to replace your custom solution with the industry's standard). Or it could have chosen to officially support Vulkan alongside it. Apple has lots of money in the bank, and with that, lots of options.

hvis 5y ago

> Metal is the reason Vulkan exists That seems to give way too little credit to Mantle. Which was released in 2013 and became the basis for Vulkan.

xenadu02 5y ago
Please re-read my parent comment. A few weeks after Apple announced Metal at WWDC Khronos members met for the first time ever to kickoff then project to replace OpenGL. I don't believe that is a coincidence. Maybe Metal was the straw that broke the Camel's back, maybe not. I also noted that AMD donated Mantle as the starting point which is why Vulkan didn't take 5 years to finalize. In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense.
- hvis 5y ago
  > Please re-read my parent comment. I just said that it's severely overstating the case. > In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense. Why not? They could have adopted Mantle instead, for example. It came out a year earlier. Or it could have replaced Metal with Vulkan later (as it is often a reasonable choice to replace your custom solution with the industry's standard). Or it could have chosen to officially support Vulkan alongside it. Apple has lots of money in the bank, and with that, lots of options.