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>Apple's Metal API is custom-made to the silicon Apple is making Do you have any examples of this? My guess is that the API, being higher level than vk/dx, is

>Apple's Metal API is custom-made to the silicon Apple is making Do you have any examples of this? My guess is that the API, being higher level than vk/dx, is designed for ease of use by developers, not to expose hardware level details. In fact Vulkan would be more suitable for that as it is lower level. >the strength of iOS clearly helped them decide to move iOS game developers to the Mac What do you mean by this? Are there a lot of mobile game studios publishing on MacOS now? (this is a legitimate question) >rather than try to court the so-called AAA companies who are stuck in an x86, Windows+console, heat up the wazoo world. Why is that? The only actual barrier there is x86. But Vulkan is not related to x86 anyway. It is only related inasmuchas they are both not supported by Apple. But this discussion is itslef about if Apple should support Vulkan, so the reasoning here seems circular. Also, if Apple doesn't like x86 games that is fine because they don't support x86. So it's not like they are not support Vulkan because they think developers will start distributing x86 games to their customers because that's impossible. >heat up the wazoo I mean, it will use the same about of energy as any other demanding application like Blender or video editing. And you can always lower the graphical settings to make it consume less power. Similarly mobile game developers would likely increase the graphical settings for a mobile game that they port to MacOS.

tcmart14 2y ago
I don't really know if it counts as 'exposing hardware details,' and I may be wrong, but this could be an example of where in their API it does make more sense for Apple Metal being separate. The example I am thinking of is with MTLBuffers and storage options. You have several different storage options for MTLBuffers that wouldn't necessarily make sense on non-apple hardware and especially non-apple silicon. Options that are not backwards compatible with intel macs. When I go to use MTKTextureLoader with the newTexture command, I can set in the options an MTKTextureLoader.Option.StorageMode as shared storage. On Apple silicon, this means that the it is a shared buffer by both the CPU and GPU since with the apple silicon architecture the came peice of memory can be accessed by both. There are a bunch of different storage options that may not apply to other configurations outside of the Apple silicon configurations.
flohofwoe 2y ago
> My guess is that the API, being higher level than vk/dx Metal is not generally higher level than VK/D3D12, instead it's a mix of high- and low-level features (where the low level features typically had been added in later Metal versions and are optional to use). You can stick to the convenient high level parts of Metal v1 (which feels a lot like the spiritual successor to D3D11) if that's good enough (which often is), but if needed there are lower level and more explicit features that match or in some parts go beyond what Vulkan and D3D12 have to offer (AFAIK argument buffers allow a couple of things that are not possible on D3D12 or Vulkan, or at least would require vendor specific extensions on Vulkan - like setting the PSO via an argument buffer, recorded in a compute shader).

tcmart14 2y ago

I don't really know if it counts as 'exposing hardware details,' and I may be wrong, but this could be an example of where in their API it does make more sense for Apple Metal being separate. The example I am thinking of is with MTLBuffers and storage options. You have several different storage options for MTLBuffers that wouldn't necessarily make sense on non-apple hardware and especially non-apple silicon. Options that are not backwards compatible with intel macs. When I go to use MTKTextureLoader with the newTexture command, I can set in the options an MTKTextureLoader.Option.StorageMode as shared storage. On Apple silicon, this means that the it is a shared buffer by both the CPU and GPU since with the apple silicon architecture the came peice of memory can be accessed by both. There are a bunch of different storage options that may not apply to other configurations outside of the Apple silicon configurations.

flohofwoe 2y ago

> My guess is that the API, being higher level than vk/dx Metal is not generally higher level than VK/D3D12, instead it's a mix of high- and low-level features (where the low level features typically had been added in later Metal versions and are optional to use). You can stick to the convenient high level parts of Metal v1 (which feels a lot like the spiritual successor to D3D11) if that's good enough (which often is), but if needed there are lower level and more explicit features that match or in some parts go beyond what Vulkan and D3D12 have to offer (AFAIK argument buffers allow a couple of things that are not possible on D3D12 or Vulkan, or at least would require vendor specific extensions on Vulkan - like setting the PSO via an argument buffer, recorded in a compute shader).