RPCS3 and Dolphin on macOS using gfx-portability

skohan wrote: post #5

AdrianRossouw wrote: post #4

i still think osx killing opengl support is ridiculous.

It is. Also not supporting Vulkan natively is a mistake.

Yes but there's nothing surprising about the Walled Garden Company promoting their own snowflake version of Vulkan and insisting everyone who wants to run software must do things their way. This is the same company who has totally locked down the tooling to create and publish iOS apps to only be possible on their hardware.

Re: RPCS3 and Dolphin on macOS using gfx-portability

#7

Post by skohan » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 12:59 PM UTC

hd4 wrote: post #6

skohan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Also not supporting Vulkan natively is a mistake.

Yes but there's nothing surprising about the Walled Garden Company promoting their own snowflake version of Vulkan and insisting everyone who wants to run software must do things their way. This is the same company who has totally locked down the tooling to create and publish iOS apps to only be possible on their hardware.

To be fair, Metal is more than a "snowflake version of Vulkan". For one thing, it was in production before vulkan, largely to address the issue of OpenGL's overhead on mobile devices, and basically it achieves that goal. Also there are certain things which are exposed in Metal which are not in Vulkan, for instance more control over the tile memory which mobile GPUs use. So it's not as if there is no reason for Metal to exist (of course I would be happier if Apple contributed to Khronos to get those features in Vulkan instead).

But the walled garden approach seems counterproductive here. In the days of Microsoft's dominance Apple made an effort to make windows formats usable on Apple because that meant it would be easier for consumers to switch to Apple without worrying about losing all their stuff from Windows. With regard to applications in which graphics API's are relevant (i.e. games) Apple still has a minuscule market-share, and it seems like they would be well served by adopting the dominant technology. Lock-in only works if you're already winning.

Re: RPCS3 and Dolphin on macOS using gfx-portability

#8

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #5

AdrianRossouw wrote: post #4

i still think osx killing opengl support is ridiculous.

It is. Also not supporting Vulkan natively is a mistake.

On the upside, the industry is now getting used to not just bending over and taking it from Apple on this. Most portable programs will be written against against the subset of Vulkan which is practical to implement on top of Metal, and Apple will see roughly no gains from pushing their proprietary API.

Re: RPCS3 and Dolphin on macOS using gfx-portability

#9

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

AdrianRossouw wrote: post #4

i still think osx killing opengl support is ridiculous.

Swift and Objective-C API with C++14 shaders vs plain old C API and manually compilation of shaders?

Obvious choice, plus all engines that matter already support Metal.

Same situation on PS4, XBox and UWP.

Re: RPCS3 and Dolphin on macOS using gfx-portability

#10

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #9

AdrianRossouw wrote: post #4

i still think osx killing opengl support is ridiculous.

Swift and Objective-C API with C++14 shaders vs plain old C API and manually compilation of shaders? Obvious choice, plus all engines that matter already support Metal. Same situation on PS4, XBox and UWP.

There is nothing wrong with saying something new could be better but is Metal actually so much better than Vulkan to be the only supported API?