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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

#81

Post by dagmx »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #65
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…

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 ra…

Many engines support Metal, in addition to the plethora of console specific APIs. Saying DX11/12 works on Xbox is glossing over that that it's not actually the same DX12 that works on desktop.

You then say that if they used Vulkan, it would mean they wouldn't have to debug on a Mac. This is overly optimistic. Even in the OpenGL days, you'd have to test on all platforms because there's so many variances. In general, the game designers are rarely working multi platform, and it's down to the engine devs themselves + QA. Neither should or would be blindly trusting that things are portable. Vulkan/DX on AMD/NVIDIA also perform differently enough that you can't just assume parity.

Your other statement about nobody wanting to work on Metal for Blender is a bit odd too. There's no current Vulkan or DX backend for it. Does that mean they're not desired either? AMD and NvidiA contribute support for their favoured API's as well, like Optix that people still desire.

> If Apple supported Vulkan, it would have allowed everyone who is not Windows to benefit by making Vulkan become more standard.

This didn't prove itself out when OpenGL was a thing. OpenGL was everywhere but barely used.

> Luckily Xbox seems to be kind of dying right now so perhaps supporting dx11/12 will not be as important in the future.

That doesn't mean that Vulkan would replace it though. Windows gaming still eclipses Linux, and game developers have to target multiple APIs either way. There's very little upside to them switching to Vulkan for it.

Also bear in mind that DX is much more than D3D. It's a lot of APIs. There's many reasons to use DX beyond just the 3D graphics APIs.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#83

Post by christkv »

talldayo wrote: post #40
dagmx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back and see how many of those games were running Cider though. The switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. The number of games that targeted OpenGL was ALSO shockingly low. This is something that OSS fans do not want to reconcile: Open source graphics APIs have LONG lost out to proprietary graphics APIs in gaming. OpenGL had a very small base in games, Vulkan is even smal…

> switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. It did. If you want to parade around how cool Cider is, it doesn't make much sense to venerate the update that killed it. > Linux has fewer native AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. Imagine all the Steam Deck users that are pissed because they can't play Resident Evil 8 and Tomb Raider natively! They must be super upset…

Considering backward compatibility on ios my bet is on proton for sure.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#84

Post by jeroenhd »

bilbo0s wrote: post #32
rowanG077 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be ironic. Apple wilfully is holding gaming back on OSX by ignoring Vulkan and having a pure shit opengl implementation.

You may have a good point with the opengl thing. But the number of games that run on Vulkan is so vanishingly small that we can't credibly say that not having a Vulkan driver holds Apple back on gaming. I'd bet any money that the number of games that work on Metal is wayyyy higher than the minuscule number of games that run on Vulkan. Which should tell you how few Vulkan games there are.

The amount of games that work with Vulkan may be very small, but at least they have a chance of working. The de facto standard API for games on computers, DirectX, will never receive a port.

If you think Vulkan support for games is insignificant, look at Metal support.

I think Vulkan makes a lot of sense for macOS, actually; the Nintendo Switch, to which tons of games have been ported already, uses the ARM+Vulkan design and has a relatively weak GPU (but much weaker, as it's very old). It's not quite native, but a lot of supporting libraries that work on the Switch will also work on Mac. Everyone is talking about porting Windows games to Mac, but with the way things are developing, porting Switch games to Mac may actually make more sense, assuming Nintendo's promises for the upcoming Switch replacement are to be believed.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#85

Post by bitwize »

skrrtww wrote: post #42
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).

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…

> I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.

It is an unfortunate truth that one must now bear in mind, that games are for all intents and purposes enterprise software. They are as critical to profitability for the companies involved as enterprise software. They are large, distributed applications which are planned, budgeted, and staffed much like enterprise software. Accordingly, there is little to no concern for performance except when it's absolutely critical: the rendering pipeline and the netcode, for instance. For things like updates, where it would be easy to make some optimizations to reduce download size, those optimizations will not be taken. So you will redownload the entire game, including all of the uncompressed audio clips, every time someone changes a byte somewhere and it's shipped as an update.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#86

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

Hacker News regularly makes me feel very stupid, and none more so than blog posts by Alyssa Rosenzweig.

I couldn't even write an engine that used Vulkan in six months, nor a software rasteriser; meanwhile, Alyssa wrote an entire compliant driver on a non-native operating system running on locked-down hardware in one month flat.

What am I doing with my life?

EDIT: I point this out because I'd eventually like to write GPU drivers too, having been fascinated by video games since I was like three.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#87

Post by mantas »

burnte wrote: post #78
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.

> 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.

Nobody required USB-C charging for laptops and iPads. It would have happened on iPhones eventually too.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#88

Post by jeroenhd »

treyd wrote: post #47
galad87 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft would never allow them to use the trademark.

While that's true, I don't think they'd need the trademark. They can call it Apple StraightforwardY, duplicate any trademarked APIs and redirect the old ones to their own methods for "compatibility". The Oracle v Google lawsuit proved that APIs can be implemented, even by competitors.

I see even less incentive for Apple to concede defeat and implement Microsoft's API than for them to port Vulkan. After all, they've already shipped a graphics engine that a handful of games have ever used with their OS so they have experience!

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#89

Post by MBCook »

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.

From what I’ve heard there are a ton more than 2. But none of them have the power.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#90

Post by MBCook »

snarfy wrote: post #39
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).

Your comment puts it very succinctly. They don't care about your gaming experience on Mac. They care about money. I wish they weren't so short sighted here. They can't see through the trees that maybe they won't make money selling games through the app store, but they would make money selling more Macs.

They didn’t really care about it before the Mac App Store either.

The OS and its libraries just aren’t designed for high performance gaming the way MS has put time into that on Windows.

They have Metal, which is supposed to be nice. But that’s their Direct3D. Where is all the other DirectX equivalent?

From what I’ve heard anecdotally that seems to be a big part of the problem. It’s not just that they don’t have Vulcan (which I think is a red herring). Or the GPUs were abysmal (they were on most models before Apple Silicon).

There’s no whole-picture. Just pieces.

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