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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

#71

Post by tombert »

hgs3 wrote: post #70
tombert wrote: post #62

A 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).

Yeah, I know, that's why I mentioned it being a target. I realize it's meant to be used for extremely low-level stuff. Which is fine, I don't get annoyed at x86_64 assembly being difficult to write.

As I said, the thing that bothers me is when people act like Vulkan is a replacement for OpenGL (presumably because they've never actually written either and they just saw some YouTube demos), and it really isn't, or at least that's an incomplete picture. It's a replacement for OpenGL in the same way writing JVM bytecode directly is a replacement for Java; they fundamentally do the same or similar things, but one is sort of categorically different in its goal.

I do wish that there was a more consumer-friendly API announced in addition to Vulkan though; I'm fine with replacing OpenGL with something newer and better-fitting for newer cards, but that's not what we got. That's why I was trying to say that I was annoyed that Apple didn't open source Metal, because I feel like it really could have taken that role.

Also, while I'm aware that Vulkan doesn't inherently imply "graphics", I would also like to point out that CUDA and rocM are also considerably easier to write than the Vulkan equivalents, at least in the little examples I played with, though I will acknowledge that I felt Vulkan was better than OpenCL.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#72

Post by nozzlegear »

jandrese wrote: post #52
rched wrote: post #43

Earlier 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...

I play games on my Mac, but I don't use Steam. I just play World of Warcraft which is a native Apple Silicon game, and a few other games that don't require Steam.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#73

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

aurareturn wrote: post #6

I wonder if this effort to add Vulcan to Linux and then translate DirectX in Asahi Linux would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon. Apple would like AAA developers to port their AAA games over to Metal so that the game has one code base but can run on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the Vision Pro. Perhaps Mac gamers will install Asahi Linux in order to play AAA PC titles.

Pretty much, Asahi Linux could become the new Bootcamp for Mac users who dual booted to play games.

FWIW I played Diablo II Resurrected on a M1 with "Whiskey". I was quite impressed that I was able to play a native Windows game just like that. It doesn't work anymore just because a stupid Blizzard launcher update now crashes and prevents starting the game.

I also ran EverQuest II admittedly an old DX9 game but still the game ran beautifully on a M1 mac mini at 1440p.

Linux Asahi may help also with older x32 titles like Guild Wars.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#74

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #10
aurareturn wrote: post #6

I wonder if this effort to add Vulcan to Linux and then translate DirectX in Asahi Linux would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon. Apple would like AAA developers to port their AAA games over to Metal so that the game has one code base but can run on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the Vision Pro. Perhaps Mac gamers will install Asahi Linux in order to play AAA PC titles.

> 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).

I don't get it. They already make a ton of money on mobile games - why not embrace Steam and Proton on their platform? What's the money in AAA games on their platform?

edit: this is to say if they had "wet dreams" about selling AAA games on Mac, we'd have seen the tides moving a long time ago.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#75

Post by out_of_protocol »

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…

> The argument that Vulkan would have solved this

but it in fact did! You can play 90% of games on linux precisely because of Vulkan. Just boot Steam Deck or whatever and play. There is no way it would work out without Vulkan

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#76

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

Tiberium wrote: post #15
drpossum wrote: post #8

Can someone explain how this relates to MoltenVK? This just removes the need for it as it's a native driver?

MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan based on Metal so that it can be used on macOS to run Vulkan applications. Asahi Linux is an in-development Linux distribution to make Linux compatible with Apple's M series processors. This specific blog post is about making GPU-accelerated Vulkan work on Asahi.

And I think the point is they will then be able to support DXVK to run Direct3D games.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#77

Post by galad87 »

kbolino wrote: post #58
galad87 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Direct3D means only Windows and Xbox. Vulkan means everything non-Apple except Xbox and PlayStation. It's not everything, but it's a larger base.

What's larger than Windows + Xbox + Playstation for AAA games?

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#78

Post by burnte »

talldayo wrote: post #4
dagmx wrote: post #2

Very impressive work, and a great testament to the value of shared, iterative and open components. I'll be curious how long it takes Proton to be ported, though I suspect even with an optimal Vk implementation, many games will run terribly due to the difference in GPU architecture + arm translation overhead + proton itself (however negligible). Still, I remain optimistic that more games will target unified memory and…

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.

> 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.

They'll never admit it. They only caved on USB-C because they were legally required to. They won't cave on this, or NVidia support, or putting the charge port on the side of the mouse and not the belly, etc.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#79

Post by astrange »

shmerl wrote: post #68
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…

> 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 th…

You can't "just support Vulkan", it's too low level. To benefit, the implementation would have to target the GPU specifically since Apple GPUs are different from discrete GPUs.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#80

Post by astrange »

coldpie wrote: post #66
skrrtww wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need indoor hobbies when the weather is this nice.
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