15 ms·

Vulkan would likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form. I consider it a red herring that people point to. The number of games that run natively on

by dagmx 2y ago

Vulkan would likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form. I consider it a red herring that people point to. The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. If we're ONLY talking about the ability to use Proton, Apple does now have Game Porting Toolkit that does effectively the same thing with comparable performance characteristics if you take out the other contributing overhead elements.

talldayo 2y ago
You can't ship Game Porting Toolkit with your game, though. DXVK doesn't have this limitation, and developers use it all the time. In effect, this means the number of games you get with native Vulkan coverage is a magnitude higher than the total sum of all Metal-native desktop titles.
- dagmx 2y ago
  This isn't completely true. Crossover is allowed to ship the GPTK components for API translation (which they currently do as of 23.5) and games are allowed to embed Crossover elements like they did in the pre-Metal days with Cider etc. All this talk of DXVK doesn’t explain why games based on engines with native metal support aren’t on a Mac either.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Crossover is a paid product, and even then has pretty poor DX12 support compared to Proton. Up until a couple years ago it didn't work at all. Again; if Apple had just supported Vulkan alongside Metal like a normal non-paranoid company, their users wouldn't be caught in the middle of this. It's such a blatantly obvious solution with no user-facing downsides. It's shocking that anyone would defend the status-quo when it's so notoriously and obviously broken.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      Your assertions aren’t backed by history though. Prior to metal and Vulkan, many games used Cider to target Mac despite having the same APi (at that point, an up to date OpenGL). And many of the current game devs do have Metal versions of their engines that they target towards iOS, yet don’t have a macOS version. The fact of the matter is that it comes down to market share. Macs have historically not had a large user base that also had capable GPUs. It’s not been worth supporting that tiny market share It’s the same on Linux. Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. This will inevitably go back to “well at least we could have used proton” but that’s also not true, and besides there’s GPTK. And then the argument becomes circular , because all evidence points to: devs just don’t care about Mac’s from a support perspective. You can make it easier, they still won’t come until the possible demographic size is larger. and even with DXVK, what about all the other platform specific differences? Vulkan wouldn't solve those either.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could play first-person shooters, online games with fancy graphics, the kit and kaboodle. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of functional cross-platform software back when Apple commit to maintaining common APIs. You cannot deny that an entire ecosystem of software that was once cross-platform had to now choose sides, if they would support Metal or OpenGL. I watched it collapse with a single system update. > Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. My brother in Christ, the "reality of the state of gaming" is that Mac owners are buying Steam Decks just to access the games Apple tries to kneecap. Vulkan fixed it, and Valve commoditized Apple's compliment. I don't want things to be this way. I think Mac owners should have easy access to the games they want to play, but Apple insisted otherwise for so long and refused to ever admit that they were wasting their time. It's part of the reason I got rid of my Mac so I could daily-drive Linux; they were wrong, and other platforms were right.
  - p_l 2y ago
    While it might be true, I'd recommend to check if the licenses do, in fact, recurse this way. They might not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LucidLynx 2y ago
> The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. Yep, that's unfortunately true... https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
- talldayo 2y ago
  I'd be curious to see how many Vulkan-native games there are that don't run under Proton. The only one that comes to mind is Destiny 2, but that was more because of anticheat as I remember it.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Much of the Vulkan support was motivated by Stadia, not so much because Stadia was successful, but because Google was throwing huge amounts of money at developers to port their games to Stadia regardless. When Stadia was discontinued at the end of 2022, sure enough the number of new Vulkan games immediately plummeted.
- tapoxi 2y ago
  Why is this article comparing game engines with games?
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    What do you mean? I guess most engines support Vulkan but that's not the point of the article, but you might be referring to something else.
- caycep 2y ago
  these days, is the way to win in the industry to basically pour money into the popularity contest of your own dev kit vs. Nvidia's and others?
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well > Vulkan Renderer has now been enabled in Star Citizen. This new renderer will be off by default but has been added to the Graphics settings menu. In this first release, the focus is on hardware/driver issues, stability, and any major performance issues. At this point we do not expect Vulkan to be outperforming D3D11 on the CPU usage due to the fact we haven't enabled multi-threading of the rendering submission yet, but do expect CPU performance to be within a 30% margin. Once we have multi-threading enabled we expect a significant net-gain. On the GPU side we should be closer to parity. > Performance improvements and stability improvements will be on-going throughout 3.23, with the aim to make Vulkan the default and more performant implementation in a following release. In the meantime we appreciate any and all feedback towards this. > Additionally, you may see a few new folders now in Star Citizen's appdata. These relate to our new Graphics Settings file (just includes the Graphics Renderer setting for now), Vulkan's Shader Cache, and Vulkan's Pipeline Cache. > We are currently working with AMD and Nvidia to improve functionality and compatibility for later Driver Releases. It is recommended that you update to the latest GPU drivers for this release but there are still a few known issues that could cause instability and crashes with Vulkan until a later AMD/Nvidia Driver update. If you run into major issues you may want to swap back to DX 11. If the game crashes on launch after switching to Vulkan, you can reset this by deleting your shader folders in %localappdata%\Star Citizen https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//19915-Star-Citizen-Alpha-3230 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//19915-Star-Cit...
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
I think you make a good point in general, but "likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form" I think is taking it too far. The reason why many developers only use dx11/12 is because adding more graphics backends increases their support surface unnecessarily, being that Vulkan only works on Windows (and Linux), while dx11/12 work on Windows on Xbox. As an extreme example of this, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 ran Vulkan on Stadia but did not enable it for Windows as an option. (Because what is the point?) If Vulkan worked on both Windows and Mac then developers would have more reason to support it. It would likely also mean game engines would put more time into making Vulkan better. For a related example, Apple had to individually contribute it's Metal backend to Blender because (presumably) nobody wanted to work on it.[0] Why? Because they already have to support OpenGL, Cuda, OptiX, Intel OneAPI, ROCm HIP, and Vulkan. Clearly, something is very wrong with graphics APIs right now. If Apple supported Vulkan, it would have allowed everyone who is not Windows to benefit by making Vulkan become more standard. Luckily Xbox seems to be kind of dying right now so perhaps supporting dx11/12 will not be as important in the future. But the point is if you have a small portion of the market it just doesn't make sense for developers to spend time entering that market for little reward. Another major point is the development cycle. Since Metal only works on Apple devices that makes developing for it more annoying for game developers which are mainly using Windows. It means they will have to switch to a Mac device to debug issues with their Metal backend. By supporting Vulkan Apple would allow for a much smoother developer experience. (While Metal Developer Tools for Windows exists, as I understand it it only allows you to compile shaders for Metal on Windows, but to actually test that anything works you will need an actual MacOS device.). [0] https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-metal-viewport/ https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-met...
- dagmx 2y ago
  Many engines support Metal, in addition to the plethora of console specific APIs. Saying DX11/12 works on Xbox is glossing over that that it's not actually the same DX12 that works on desktop. You then say that if they used Vulkan, it would mean they wouldn't have to debug on a Mac. This is overly optimistic. Even in the OpenGL days, you'd have to test on all platforms because there's so many variances. In general, the game designers are rarely working multi platform, and it's down to the engine devs themselves + QA. Neither should or would be blindly trusting that things are portable. Vulkan/DX on AMD/NVIDIA also perform differently enough that you can't just assume parity. Your other statement about nobody wanting to work on Metal for Blender is a bit odd too. There's no current Vulkan or DX backend for it. Does that mean they're not desired either? AMD and NvidiA contribute support for their favoured API's as well, like Optix that people still desire. > If Apple supported Vulkan, it would have allowed everyone who is not Windows to benefit by making Vulkan become more standard. This didn't prove itself out when OpenGL was a thing. OpenGL was everywhere but barely used. > Luckily Xbox seems to be kind of dying right now so perhaps supporting dx11/12 will not be as important in the future. That doesn't mean that Vulkan would replace it though. Windows gaming still eclipses Linux, and game developers have to target multiple APIs either way. There's very little upside to them switching to Vulkan for it. Also bear in mind that DX is much more than D3D. It's a lot of APIs. There's many reasons to use DX beyond just the 3D graphics APIs.
shmerl 2y ago
> Vulkan would likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form Why not? With fully conformant Vulkan you could have run all the games that work in Wine without being hit by limitations of MoltenVK that affect performance and compatibility, same as you can run them on Linux now. So Vulkan could totally be very crucial for making gaming on macOS not being some second class experience. Apple simply demonstrate they don't care about gaming and gamers. They only care about "approved by Apple way of gaming" which is totally not the same thing but which Apple always does for everything anyway, shoving in users' faces "we know better than you what you need". That's why I will always say that gamers should avoid using Apple.
- astrange 2y ago
  You can't "just support Vulkan", it's too low level. To benefit, the implementation would have to target the GPU specifically since Apple GPUs are different from discrete GPUs.
  - shmerl 2y ago
    Well, Asahi / Mesa developers demonstrated that they can "just support Vulkan" on Apple's hardware as the linked post explains. So Apple never had any excuse for not doing it. Their reasons for sabotaging Vulkan support were always political, not technical.
    - robertoandred 2y ago
      Sabotaging? Metal came before Vulkan.
      - shmerl 2y ago
        How does that stop Apple from supporting Vulkan on their system? It is pure political sabotaging. And you can't pull any excuses like "it requires effort". Apple have pools of cash to do the right thing for users and developers. They simply very intentionally oppose it due to their dinosaur lock-in mentality.
pcwalton 2y ago
Vulkan probably wouldn't help macOS gaming from a users' point of view, but it sure would be nice for us engine developers. There aren't many Vulkan games, but the big 3 non-in-house game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) are all committed to supporting Vulkan in addition to Metal, so we (collectively, the engine dev community) currently have to support both. Dropping Metal would reduce the amount of engineer time spent chasing down Metal-specific bugs (which is not inconsequential), which allows us to spend more time on actually interesting features that users want. Metal is a hidden tax that isn't obvious, but it's there.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Interesting point of view that could also be the other way around, Vulkan support being a hidden tax for the love of open source and free software rather than something really useful the market needed on top of others APIs / GPU architectures / platforms, pushed by a subset / minority of developers more ideological than practical grounded developers who accept that competition of private standards will bring out the best user experience, each platform having its customized architecture. After all, scientists don’t write much CUDA oriented for game development anymore or custom maths shaders, they have their own CUDA libraries helping them in their own domains better than what a gamedev orienter Vulkan would do. Any percent shaved off developer time and running time is worth a lot of money. The Apple Metal platform surely is customized to the needs of Apple, its devices and its users ultimate needs, in a way Vulkan will never be. Unified memory on recent Apple silicon M1 M2 M3 where RAM and VRAM are somehow merged. Maybe the society of worldwide developers had better things to do than spend precious time on Vulkan.
  - _carbyau_ 2y ago
    Coverage. Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more. But money talks and game engines want a slice of that sweet apple pie.
    - dev_tty01 2y ago
      > Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more. I'm not sure "more" is the right term here. There are about 1.3 billion iPhone users worldwide. Sure, Vulkan covers more OS environments, but how important is that to a game developer vs. total available users? Does Vulkan user reach exceed 1.3 billion?
SoothingSorbet 2y ago
>The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it. Secondly, it does not have to be _native_, on top of Vulkan you can run OpenGL and Direct3D emulation layers, which will cover most of the rest. macOS has long since abandoned their native OpenGL drivers, and MoltenVK has many caveats.
- lonjil 2y ago
  > Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it. So? If no one is using that support to ship PC games using Vulkan, who cares? Those same engines all support Metal, so clearly this is irrelevant to the question of Mac gaming.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. You mean iOS games?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It is still Metal, regardless.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    But since there are more Android phones, there are more devices supporting Vulkan than devices supporting Metal.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Only if you ignore the facts that Vulkan is only a required API since Android 10, it is an ecosystem full of buggy drivers, there are no updates, what exact version of Vulkan and extension spaghetti varies widely by phone, and only Samsung and Google Pixel phones, do actually offer a sane Vulkan experience. Everyone that wants to keep their 3D sanity keeps targeting OpenGL ES, which is exactly why Google is now doing ANGLE on top of Vulkan as means to pressure OEMs to deliver proper Vulkan drivers.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    You are literally comparing a bunch of gambling apps to a library of desktop gaming experiences. "It is still Metal, regardless" you say, with your mind scrolling full of Zynga dice-rolling games and Supercell micro-transaction machines.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I am comparing what brings money home, big boys club money, versus hippie feel good complaints.
      - talldayo 2y ago
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. When it's the only way to interface with MacOS and especially IOS, I'm not surprised. But that says more about Apple as a platform than Vulkan as a graphics API. >Apple does now have Game Porting Toolkit yup, only took some 9 years after they abandoned Khronos to get it up and running. I'm sure nothing signifigant would have developed in that time.

by dagmx 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago

You can't ship Game Porting Toolkit with your game, though. DXVK doesn't have this limitation, and developers use it all the time. In effect, this means the number of games you get with native Vulkan coverage is a magnitude higher than the total sum of all Metal-native desktop titles.

dagmx 2y ago
This isn't completely true. Crossover is allowed to ship the GPTK components for API translation (which they currently do as of 23.5) and games are allowed to embed Crossover elements like they did in the pre-Metal days with Cider etc. All this talk of DXVK doesn’t explain why games based on engines with native metal support aren’t on a Mac either.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Crossover is a paid product, and even then has pretty poor DX12 support compared to Proton. Up until a couple years ago it didn't work at all. Again; if Apple had just supported Vulkan alongside Metal like a normal non-paranoid company, their users wouldn't be caught in the middle of this. It's such a blatantly obvious solution with no user-facing downsides. It's shocking that anyone would defend the status-quo when it's so notoriously and obviously broken.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Your assertions aren’t backed by history though. Prior to metal and Vulkan, many games used Cider to target Mac despite having the same APi (at that point, an up to date OpenGL). And many of the current game devs do have Metal versions of their engines that they target towards iOS, yet don’t have a macOS version. The fact of the matter is that it comes down to market share. Macs have historically not had a large user base that also had capable GPUs. It’s not been worth supporting that tiny market share It’s the same on Linux. Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. This will inevitably go back to “well at least we could have used proton” but that’s also not true, and besides there’s GPTK. And then the argument becomes circular , because all evidence points to: devs just don’t care about Mac’s from a support perspective. You can make it easier, they still won’t come until the possible demographic size is larger. and even with DXVK, what about all the other platform specific differences? Vulkan wouldn't solve those either.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could play first-person shooters, online games with fancy graphics, the kit and kaboodle. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of functional cross-platform software back when Apple commit to maintaining common APIs. You cannot deny that an entire ecosystem of software that was once cross-platform had to now choose sides, if they would support Metal or OpenGL. I watched it collapse with a single system update. > Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. My brother in Christ, the "reality of the state of gaming" is that Mac owners are buying Steam Decks just to access the games Apple tries to kneecap. Vulkan fixed it, and Valve commoditized Apple's compliment. I don't want things to be this way. I think Mac owners should have easy access to the games they want to play, but Apple insisted otherwise for so long and refused to ever admit that they were wasting their time. It's part of the reason I got rid of my Mac so I could daily-drive Linux; they were wrong, and other platforms were right.
- p_l 2y ago
  While it might be true, I'd recommend to check if the licenses do, in fact, recurse this way. They might not.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

LucidLynx 2y ago

> The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. Yep, that's unfortunately true... https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/

talldayo 2y ago
I'd be curious to see how many Vulkan-native games there are that don't run under Proton. The only one that comes to mind is Destiny 2, but that was more because of anticheat as I remember it.
jsheard 2y ago
Much of the Vulkan support was motivated by Stadia, not so much because Stadia was successful, but because Google was throwing huge amounts of money at developers to port their games to Stadia regardless. When Stadia was discontinued at the end of 2022, sure enough the number of new Vulkan games immediately plummeted.
tapoxi 2y ago
Why is this article comparing game engines with games?
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  What do you mean? I guess most engines support Vulkan but that's not the point of the article, but you might be referring to something else.
caycep 2y ago
these days, is the way to win in the industry to basically pour money into the popularity contest of your own dev kit vs. Nvidia's and others?
wlesieutre 2y ago
Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well > Vulkan Renderer has now been enabled in Star Citizen. This new renderer will be off by default but has been added to the Graphics settings menu. In this first release, the focus is on hardware/driver issues, stability, and any major performance issues. At this point we do not expect Vulkan to be outperforming D3D11 on the CPU usage due to the fact we haven't enabled multi-threading of the rendering submission yet, but do expect CPU performance to be within a 30% margin. Once we have multi-threading enabled we expect a significant net-gain. On the GPU side we should be closer to parity. > Performance improvements and stability improvements will be on-going throughout 3.23, with the aim to make Vulkan the default and more performant implementation in a following release. In the meantime we appreciate any and all feedback towards this. > Additionally, you may see a few new folders now in Star Citizen's appdata. These relate to our new Graphics Settings file (just includes the Graphics Renderer setting for now), Vulkan's Shader Cache, and Vulkan's Pipeline Cache. > We are currently working with AMD and Nvidia to improve functionality and compatibility for later Driver Releases. It is recommended that you update to the latest GPU drivers for this release but there are still a few known issues that could cause instability and crashes with Vulkan until a later AMD/Nvidia Driver update. If you run into major issues you may want to swap back to DX 11. If the game crashes on launch after switching to Vulkan, you can reset this by deleting your shader folders in %localappdata%\Star Citizen https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//19915-Star-Citizen-Alpha-3230 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//19915-Star-Cit...

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

I think you make a good point in general, but "likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form" I think is taking it too far. The reason why many developers only use dx11/12 is because adding more graphics backends increases their support surface unnecessarily, being that Vulkan only works on Windows (and Linux), while dx11/12 work on Windows on Xbox. As an extreme example of this, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 ran Vulkan on Stadia but did not enable it for Windows as an option. (Because what is the point?) If Vulkan worked on both Windows and Mac then developers would have more reason to support it. It would likely also mean game engines would put more time into making Vulkan better. For a related example, Apple had to individually contribute it's Metal backend to Blender because (presumably) nobody wanted to work on it.[0] Why? Because they already have to support OpenGL, Cuda, OptiX, Intel OneAPI, ROCm HIP, and Vulkan. Clearly, something is very wrong with graphics APIs right now. If Apple supported Vulkan, it would have allowed everyone who is not Windows to benefit by making Vulkan become more standard. Luckily Xbox seems to be kind of dying right now so perhaps supporting dx11/12 will not be as important in the future. But the point is if you have a small portion of the market it just doesn't make sense for developers to spend time entering that market for little reward. Another major point is the development cycle. Since Metal only works on Apple devices that makes developing for it more annoying for game developers which are mainly using Windows. It means they will have to switch to a Mac device to debug issues with their Metal backend. By supporting Vulkan Apple would allow for a much smoother developer experience. (While Metal Developer Tools for Windows exists, as I understand it it only allows you to compile shaders for Metal on Windows, but to actually test that anything works you will need an actual MacOS device.). [0] https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-metal-viewport/ https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-met...

dagmx 2y ago
Many engines support Metal, in addition to the plethora of console specific APIs. Saying DX11/12 works on Xbox is glossing over that that it's not actually the same DX12 that works on desktop. You then say that if they used Vulkan, it would mean they wouldn't have to debug on a Mac. This is overly optimistic. Even in the OpenGL days, you'd have to test on all platforms because there's so many variances. In general, the game designers are rarely working multi platform, and it's down to the engine devs themselves + QA. Neither should or would be blindly trusting that things are portable. Vulkan/DX on AMD/NVIDIA also perform differently enough that you can't just assume parity. Your other statement about nobody wanting to work on Metal for Blender is a bit odd too. There's no current Vulkan or DX backend for it. Does that mean they're not desired either? AMD and NvidiA contribute support for their favoured API's as well, like Optix that people still desire. > If Apple supported Vulkan, it would have allowed everyone who is not Windows to benefit by making Vulkan become more standard. This didn't prove itself out when OpenGL was a thing. OpenGL was everywhere but barely used. > Luckily Xbox seems to be kind of dying right now so perhaps supporting dx11/12 will not be as important in the future. That doesn't mean that Vulkan would replace it though. Windows gaming still eclipses Linux, and game developers have to target multiple APIs either way. There's very little upside to them switching to Vulkan for it. Also bear in mind that DX is much more than D3D. It's a lot of APIs. There's many reasons to use DX beyond just the 3D graphics APIs.

shmerl 2y ago

> Vulkan would likely not really have helped macOS gaming in any form Why not? With fully conformant Vulkan you could have run all the games that work in Wine without being hit by limitations of MoltenVK that affect performance and compatibility, same as you can run them on Linux now. So Vulkan could totally be very crucial for making gaming on macOS not being some second class experience. Apple simply demonstrate they don't care about gaming and gamers. They only care about "approved by Apple way of gaming" which is totally not the same thing but which Apple always does for everything anyway, shoving in users' faces "we know better than you what you need". That's why I will always say that gamers should avoid using Apple.

astrange 2y ago
You can't "just support Vulkan", it's too low level. To benefit, the implementation would have to target the GPU specifically since Apple GPUs are different from discrete GPUs.
- shmerl 2y ago
  Well, Asahi / Mesa developers demonstrated that they can "just support Vulkan" on Apple's hardware as the linked post explains. So Apple never had any excuse for not doing it. Their reasons for sabotaging Vulkan support were always political, not technical.
  - robertoandred 2y ago
    Sabotaging? Metal came before Vulkan.
    - shmerl 2y ago
      How does that stop Apple from supporting Vulkan on their system? It is pure political sabotaging. And you can't pull any excuses like "it requires effort". Apple have pools of cash to do the right thing for users and developers. They simply very intentionally oppose it due to their dinosaur lock-in mentality.

pcwalton 2y ago

Vulkan probably wouldn't help macOS gaming from a users' point of view, but it sure would be nice for us engine developers. There aren't many Vulkan games, but the big 3 non-in-house game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) are all committed to supporting Vulkan in addition to Metal, so we (collectively, the engine dev community) currently have to support both. Dropping Metal would reduce the amount of engineer time spent chasing down Metal-specific bugs (which is not inconsequential), which allows us to spend more time on actually interesting features that users want. Metal is a hidden tax that isn't obvious, but it's there.

ttoinou 2y ago
Interesting point of view that could also be the other way around, Vulkan support being a hidden tax for the love of open source and free software rather than something really useful the market needed on top of others APIs / GPU architectures / platforms, pushed by a subset / minority of developers more ideological than practical grounded developers who accept that competition of private standards will bring out the best user experience, each platform having its customized architecture. After all, scientists don’t write much CUDA oriented for game development anymore or custom maths shaders, they have their own CUDA libraries helping them in their own domains better than what a gamedev orienter Vulkan would do. Any percent shaved off developer time and running time is worth a lot of money. The Apple Metal platform surely is customized to the needs of Apple, its devices and its users ultimate needs, in a way Vulkan will never be. Unified memory on recent Apple silicon M1 M2 M3 where RAM and VRAM are somehow merged. Maybe the society of worldwide developers had better things to do than spend precious time on Vulkan.
- _carbyau_ 2y ago
  Coverage. Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more. But money talks and game engines want a slice of that sweet apple pie.
  - dev_tty01 2y ago
    > Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more. I'm not sure "more" is the right term here. There are about 1.3 billion iPhone users worldwide. Sure, Vulkan covers more OS environments, but how important is that to a game developer vs. total available users? Does Vulkan user reach exceed 1.3 billion?

SoothingSorbet 2y ago

>The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it. Secondly, it does not have to be _native_, on top of Vulkan you can run OpenGL and Direct3D emulation layers, which will cover most of the rest. macOS has long since abandoned their native OpenGL drivers, and MoltenVK has many caveats.

lonjil 2y ago
> Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it. So? If no one is using that support to ship PC games using Vulkan, who cares? Those same engines all support Metal, so clearly this is irrelevant to the question of Mac gaming.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. You mean iOS games?

pjmlp 2y ago
It is still Metal, regardless.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  But since there are more Android phones, there are more devices supporting Vulkan than devices supporting Metal.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Only if you ignore the facts that Vulkan is only a required API since Android 10, it is an ecosystem full of buggy drivers, there are no updates, what exact version of Vulkan and extension spaghetti varies widely by phone, and only Samsung and Google Pixel phones, do actually offer a sane Vulkan experience. Everyone that wants to keep their 3D sanity keeps targeting OpenGL ES, which is exactly why Google is now doing ANGLE on top of Vulkan as means to pressure OEMs to deliver proper Vulkan drivers.
- talldayo 2y ago
  You are literally comparing a bunch of gambling apps to a library of desktop gaming experiences. "It is still Metal, regardless" you say, with your mind scrolling full of Zynga dice-rolling games and Supercell micro-transaction machines.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I am comparing what brings money home, big boys club money, versus hippie feel good complaints.
    - talldayo 2y ago

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. When it's the only way to interface with MacOS and especially IOS, I'm not surprised. But that says more about Apple as a platform than Vulkan as a graphics API. >Apple does now have Game Porting Toolkit yup, only took some 9 years after they abandoned Khronos to get it up and running. I'm sure nothing signifigant would have developed in that time.