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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

#161
post #78
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.

Maybe so. But they did cave on/rethink decisions around: the MagSafe adapter; butterfly switches; laptop thinness generally (but only a little); onboard HDMI/SD; touchbar controls (for now).

Not saying that means they'll immediately see the light WRT 3D graphics APIs. Just that they aren't universally hostile to revising prior decisions.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#162
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…

Why do you have tunnel vision on "native". It's a pretty meaningless distinction at this point. No steam deck users cares that all the games they are playing aren't "native".

Precisely. Modern games incorporate all manner of middleware to add functionality. Compression, video codecs, shading, ray tracing, physics, animation, anti-cheat. What's one more piece of software in the pile to abstract away platform-specific interfaces?

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#163
post #140
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. People who keep saying this have surprisingly short/bad memories. And very little idea of the state of the industry. - Apple already shipped Metal version 1 a full year before Vulkan was even an idea. iPhone, one of the largest casual gaming platforms i…

> Apple already shipped Metal version 1 a full year before Vulkan was even an idea.

That doesn't stop them from implementing two APIs at once, like every single GPU hardware vendor in existence. But given their avoidance of OpenGL and OpenCL, we should have always assumed Apple's goal was to usurp Open interfaces and replace them with only proprietary options. What else could they intend to signal?

> Windows and Xbox is DirectX

Yes. DirectX is covered almost in it's entirety by DXVK. It's harder to find a DirectX game that isn't playable with Vulkan than one that is.

https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount

> Playstation is their own thing (keep forgetting what it's called)

Yeah, and it keeps biting them in the ass when they have to then backport Playstation-native titles to PC with DirectX. It's a notoriously redundant process.

> That leaves Android (mostly underpowered and fractured to even run games properly) and Switch who really support Vulkan.

Well also Windows, Linux, BSD, HaikuOS, Google Fuchsia, QNX, Stadia and Tizen.

And hardware wise you can't forget that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm and Broadcomm all support it in their GPUs.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#164
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.

Linux market share is considerably ahead of macOS according to the Steam hardware survey. Just this past month, Linux is sitting at 2.32% compared to macOS at 1.47%.

Genuine question: is it actually reasonable to compare desktop/laptop OS market share with handheld market share? Like... what does that actually tell us? I suppose in the case of gaming it can be useful, since at this point more games are played on Linux (due to SteamDeck) than on macOS. But otherwise, I always get a weird feeling when someone lumps these stats together.

I guess part of the weirdness I feel is when people say "Linux is the most used OS in the world" because of all the Android devices floating around, which is super misleading, since "Linux" isn't really an OS on its own anymore. (Technically it never was, but I'm not one of the "GNU/Linux" pedants, so...) Android and GNU/Linux are very distinct, very different OSes, so it makes no sense to lump them together. "Linux is the most-used kernel in the world" is a more accurate statement, but, again, I'm not really sure what that actually tells us in practical terms.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#165
post #4
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.

Gaming on MacOS isn't hard, it's just bad.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#166
post #165
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.

Gaming on MacOS isn't hard , it's just bad .

It's kinda both. I think there's ample demand and opportunity to create a simplified Asahi install script optimized for pushbutton gaming. The biggest constraining factor is disc space.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#167
post #14

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.

There are already high quality implementations of every version of Direct3D released over the past couple decades built on top of Vulkan.

Writing a Vulkan driver is purportedly a much easier task than for higher level graphics APIs like Direct3D/OpenGL.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#168
post #143
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> They'll never admit it. Admit what? That they had their own API before anyone even thought about Vulkan? That they have Metal running on one of the most popular platforms in the world (iOS)? That other major platforms don't support Vulkan (Xbox, Playstation; Windows supports DX and defers Vulkan support to GPU vendors)?

Metal was released in June 2014[0], and Vulkan development started a month later, in July 2014[1].

You can interpret that in a few different ways: perhaps Khronos saw Metal's release, went "oh shit, we need to do something", and scrambled to start development of a new API over the next month. Or maybe Khronos (and Valve and others) were already talking about something new for some time before that, and only got a fire lit under themselves after Apple's Metal release. Or maybe the two aren't related at all.

Yes, it took a further two years for any kind of reasonable Vulkan support to be out there, but either way, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say Apple was a trailblazer with absolutely no peer here.

Regardless, the gaming situation on macOS is still... not great. Certainly some game developers have adopted Metal, but overall the main target is still DirectX, and I feel like contemporary/modern OpenGL (ES?) still probably leads Metal. Hell, at this point, Vulkan might have seen more general adoption than Metal has.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#History

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#169

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).

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.

Buying from Steam doesn't give them the appstore cut. And nobody buys Macs for gaming, so it doesn't drive hardware sales either.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#170
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how feasible a Metal compatibility library wrapped around Vulkan would be? That way you could use Metal on other platforms. Also, what is the best resource for learning Metal if all you know is some OpenGL 1.x from the old “Lego” book?

> I wonder how feasible a Metal compatibility library wrapped around Vulkan would be? Sort of an inverse of the MoltenVK project? I don't see any reason why that would be infeasible other than "no one really wants this but me". > Also, what is the best resource for learning Metal if all you know is some OpenGL 1.x from the old “Lego” book? To be clear, I am not a graphics person, I'm a dude who dicks around with grap…

Thanks! I always wanted to learn Metal, but it doesn’t seem like there are many resources on it other than Apple’s website.
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