why use Fex instead of Box86?
Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
61–70 of 372 posts
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#62A very large part of me is annoyed that Apple didn't open source Metal before Vulkan was released. OpenGL definitely was annoying to work with, but Vulkan is impossible for the average user to do anything with; drawing a spinning cube takes several hundred lines of code, which I've written and I still don't really understand!
I realize that Vulkan isn't meant for a "humans" to write, it's basically meant to be a target, and that's fine, but it annoys me that you get people on forums that say "learn Vulkan instead" when people ask for help with OpenGL.
Metal is substantially more fun to write than OpenGL or Vulkan; I haven't measured any performance stuff on it, but it certainly feels fast enough, and I've been able to do basic graphics experiments with it in way less time than I was ever able to accomplish with OpenGL or Vulkan.
Still, whether or not it annoys me that Vulkan has become the new standard, portability of the standard is important, so obviously this announcement is a godo thing.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#63A very large part of me is annoyed that Apple didn't open source Metal before Vulkan was released. OpenGL definitely was annoying to work with, but Vulkan is impossible for the average user to do anything with; drawing a spinning cube takes several hundred lines of code, which I've written and I still don't really understand! I realize that Vulkan isn't meant for a "humans" to write, it's basically meant to be a targ…
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Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#64[dead]
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#65Earlier 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…
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-met...
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#66Earlier 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).
This is a bit of a tangential rant, so I apologize. But I recently tried to update Death Stranding, the flagship AAA game that Apple landed on macOS and in the App Store. The game itself is 77.5 GB; it had required a little over 150 GB to install. I shrugged that off at the time; they haven't figured out how to decompress on the fly, whatever. I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the updat…
There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.
For whatever reason Steam just doesn't seem very popular with Mac users. In the latest Hardware survey Mac users were outnumbered by Linux users by 50%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#68Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#69Earlier 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/
Why is this article comparing game engines with games?
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#70A very large part of me is annoyed that Apple didn't open source Metal before Vulkan was released. OpenGL definitely was annoying to work with, but Vulkan is impossible for the average user to do anything with; drawing a spinning cube takes several hundred lines of code, which I've written and I still don't really understand! I realize that Vulkan isn't meant for a "humans" to write, it's basically meant to be a targ…
Please don't misinterpret this as gate keeping, but Vulkan is designed by and for professionals (not hobbyists). It is certainly not a rapid prototyping tool. Vulkan and OpenGL aren't comparable because Vulkan isn't merely a graphics API, but rather it's a low-level GPU API. For example you can use Vulkan in place of CUDA for running highly parallelized computations on the GPU (no graphics implied).