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Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

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Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#321

Post by liuliu »

fnord123 wrote: post #147
dkonofalski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "not supporting Vulkan on their platforms"? I thought Vulkan was an API that software developers used for graphics... Isn't that a part of OpenGL? Is Apple actively blocking something or have they just left something out?

Vulkan is a new API distinct from OpenGL. It's lower level but has a nicer API in some respects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API) Apple decided to not support Vulkan as it had been developing a competing API called Metal at around the same time. I don't know why they don't also support Vulkan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)

Saying it is around the same time is to ignore the history.

Metal is available since Jun 2014. Vulkan announced on 2015 and the initial release is on 2016.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#322

Post by MBCook »

kshmir wrote: post #183
ricardobeat wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain? Why is Vulkan not good for the web?

With that logic, we should only have blink, or webkit or gecko, just one engine

But we do have more less one standard: HTML & JS.

Blink, WebKit, gecko, etc are implementations that support that standard.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#323

Post by ioquatix »

MBCook wrote: post #296
ioquatix wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for Apple... For the consumer? I don't think so. As a consumer, the mobile device market is a walled garden. Are apps compatible between platforms? Do you have control over your hardware? Can you choose what software you run on your own device?

Consumers don't appear to be bothered by any of those missing freedoms.

That's a faulty generalisation. I am a "consumer" and I'm bothered by it.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#324

Post by Strom »

int_19h wrote: post #113
om2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vulkan on Windows is all based on unofficial drivers that don't come with Windows and aren't supported by MS. We don't think it's right to depend on this even if it's theoretically possible. Likewise for unofficial macOS/iOS drivers.

What do you mean by "unofficial drivers"? Looking at the support matrix on Wikipedia, it seems that both NVIDIA and ATI support it in their official Windows drivers.

I guess he means that Microsoft isn't aggressive enough in distributing these drivers via Windows Update. Definitely the case with older Windows versions like Windows 7 where Windows Update doesn't seem to offer GPU driver updates at all if you have manually installed something like the driver cd that was in the GPU box. However with Windows 10 they have gotten more aggresive in updating these drivers. [1] Still, a lot of people on older Windows versions where the GPU drivers are likely out of date enough not to contain Vulkan.

[1] http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/stop-automatic-driver-upd...

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#325

Post by MBCook »

phire wrote: post #182
ytugiuyghvk wrote: post #157

Related reading re. Vulkan "What a WebGL2 successor could look like and why it can’t be WebVulkan" - https://floooh.github.io/2016/08/13/webgl-next.html See also the the author's sketch of a next-gen web graphics API on top of WebGL ( https://floooh.github.io/2016/10/24/altai.html ) which is (perhaps unsurprisingl) broadly similar to the sketch given the article (minus command queues, shader libraries, ...).

Everyone here (including me) is upset that Apple are refusing to support Vulkan (or even improve their existing OpenGL support). They haven't even made a public statement. And now we get the news that they are working on another API. It doesn't really matter that the new API is targeting a completely different market to Vulkan. It doesn't really matter that a WebVulkan can't really exist in the first place. It doesn'…

So, you're mad about a desktop API choice and therefore any discussion involving graphics API and Apple in any context must devolve into a fight over what you care about? Not the topic at hand even if it is "probably the correct starting point for a NextGen web graphics API"?

The Apple employees posting in here posting some really interesting stuff, but it's all being drowned out by this noise that has little to do with the topic at hand.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#327

Post by saurik »

paulddraper wrote: post #231
saurik wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Service Workers, Pointer Events, Web Notifications, WebRTC... I could probably go on, but these are the ones everyone generally has at the top of their heads and which I can just rattle off without thinking about it much (and which have already been mentioned by other people on this very threads, and so absolutely should not require listing :/). The story of IndexedDB vs WebSQL (with Safari developers apparently bein…

Firefox was just the opposite on Indexed DB/WebSQL. History written by the victors.

WebSQL was never going to be picked up by Microsoft either: it was a WebKit-only concept that was doomed from the start.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#328

Post by MBCook »

esrauch wrote: post #308
eridius wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. I get the feeling you didn't really read the blog post. This proposed standard is supposed to be able to be implemented on top of all 3 platform-specific APIs, it's not made specifically for Metal. Yes, they're using the Metal Shading Language in this initial proposal. But in the blog post they explicitly say that the choice of the shading language is likely to be contentious (or, as they put it, "fun"),…

While I'm far less negative about this blog post than most of the other commentators seem to be, the part where you cite seems more like "well yeah, we're proposing Metal, and that's obviously going to be contentious so lets sheepishly point out that again this is all subject to negotiation". My interpretation might be too uncharitable, or yours might be too charitable by taking it at face value, it's pretty difficul…

My reading was "we have to pick something so here's something we have on hand because we don't want to spend all the time of making a fake one we intend to throw out anyway".

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#329

Post by ioquatix »

spatulon wrote: post #254
ioquatix wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to back up those assertions with real world evidence?

Chrome and Firefox felt there were sufficient problems with OpenGL driver availabity that they implemented WebGL using DirectX (via the ANGLE project), despite the more obvious mapping to OpenGL. Is there any reason to believe that, unlike OpenGL, Vulkan drivers will be sufficiently widespread for browser vendors to use it on Windows?

That's really fascinating and I didn't know that.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#330

Post by MBCook »

intrasight wrote: post #313

If Apple has like 4% of the OS market and seems to be abandoning the desktop, why do we really care what Apple thinks?

Because of the fact they helped usher in the modern web with WebKit and they're the ones in charge of this very popular thing called iOS?
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