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Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

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Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#21

Post by p_l »

dagmx wrote: post #16
talldayo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

While it might be true, I'd recommend to check if the licenses do, in fact, recurse this way.

They might not.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#22

Post by babypuncher »

galad87 wrote: post #14
rowanG077 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple truly wanted that they could simply implement Vulkan.

Why Vulkan? Let's implement DirectX directly and call it a day.

Vulkan is how Direct3D is implemented on non-Windows operating systems, thanks to DXVK.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#23

Post by littlecranky67 »

babypuncher wrote: post #19
littlecranky67 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon Apple's dream is not to have AAA games land on Apple Silicon - they can do this with Proton-like layer, like they did with GPTK. Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store. That is why the GPTK effort is only have assed (and the license prevents Valve integrating it into steam directly).

> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store This is why their efforts are largely doomed. I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version. If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on…

> This is why their efforts are largely doomed

I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon being "enough" gaming machines for 1080p@60) and wants to bring gaming over - that is probably the stream that made GPTK happen and give a licensing exception to crossover to be able to integrate it in their department. I'm in the later department, hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#24

Post by LucidLynx »

dagmx wrote: post #7
talldayo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a small bit of irony if the gaming experience on Asahi ends up easier and more straightforward than MacOS. Really just drives home how big of a mistake it was ignoring Vulkan for the past decade on Apple's behalf, but lord knows they won't admit that until it's too late.

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 compar…

> 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/

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#25

Post by talldayo »

LucidLynx wrote: post #24
dagmx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compar…

> 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/

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.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#26

Post by galad87 »

babypuncher wrote: post #22
galad87 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Vulkan? Let's implement DirectX directly and call it a day.

Vulkan is how Direct3D is implemented on non-Windows operating systems, thanks to DXVK.

I know, but why make a Direct3D wrapper on Vulkan when in the end you are going to run only Direct3D games anyway.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#27

Post by babypuncher »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #23
babypuncher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store This is why their efforts are largely doomed. I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version. If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on…

> This is why their efforts are largely doomed I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon…

> hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.

I would absolutely LOVE this! I also know a lot of people who would be a lot more interested in buying a Macbook if this were a thing.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#28

Post by jsheard »

LucidLynx wrote: post #24
dagmx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compar…

> 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/

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.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#29

Post by dagmx »

talldayo wrote: post #20
dagmx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#30

Post by talldayo »

dagmx wrote: post #29
talldayo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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