I assumed this means a ULA rocket would be transported down a British highway.
Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
171–180 of 372 posts
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#172Earlier 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…
Wow. Truly that's bizarre.
Clearly the App Store was never meant for distribution of 75 GB games, it's clearly meant for mostly I'm surprised they even allow huge apps like that in the first place, and don't have e.g. a 5 GB hard limit for usability reasons. They should have a limit if they're not going to support patch upgrades.
Who the heck has 231 GB free on their Mac internal SSD? Almost nobody. Why would the developer even distribute this via the App Store at all, for such a miniscule user base?
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you think Vulkan support for games is insignificant, look at Metal support. Metal is supported on iOS. You know, one of the largest gaming platforms in the world.
THE largest gaming platform in the world. Users, sales, number of games, hours played. I challenge you to find one metric where the iPhone isn't number one.
And yet most popular games on phones (both ios and android) are complete shit full of predatory practices with appalling gameplay and simple graphics, which barely benefit from those fancy graphics API anyway and could be reworked within weeks to use any other API.
I do know apple is trying to push for AAA games on iphone but so far its a small drip on a giant cesspool.
If you want actual good games, be it indies, AA or AAA, you go for one of the three consoles, windows or steam deck/linux.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Apple killed support for legacy 32-bit applications a good while back, which killed support for virtually every Mac game port.
The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
>I do wish that there was a more consumer-friendly API announced in addition to Vulkan though
Maybe WebGPU could be that?
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#176Earlier 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'm sure it doesn't make a big difference but the issue with this is it doesn't count Mac users using CrossOver/Whisky because they get detected as Windows users, while Linux users with Proton are reported as using Linux.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#177If you're unfamiliar with Vulkan 1.3 but are interested in low level graphics API work, you should check it out. It is a game changer and a huge difference to Vulkan 1.0. Once past the initial hurdle it's a pleasure to work with, with all dynamic states and no render pass up front set up, it is much easier to work with, even easier than OpenGL (which I've used for 20 years). Graphics programming is fun again. It's av…
Is there any tutorial/documentation to get started with Vulkan 1.3 specifically? Last time I looked, all I found was a hodgepodge of techniques using old and new methods haphazardly in various combinations. Though that is exactly how OpenGL used to be, so maybe the apple (heh!) doesn't fall far from the tree. Well done, Khronos...
https://vkguide.dev/ is fantastic.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think it is actually a reasonable thing to compare. I've had similar thoughts on the Android comparison. Yes, Linux is the most widely used kernel in the world, but that doesn't mean that desktop GNU/Linux is up to the same level of usability. That doesn't mean that desktop GNU/Linux would provide a good touchscreen experience on a tablet. It could, but the entire userspace software stack is completely different.
I think what it does indicate is that the kernel is featureful, stable, extensible, reliable, and a good base to build products and services from.
SteamOS on the Steam Deck is a close cousin of desktop GNU/Linux, purpose built for gaming. It might be a handheld, but it's also a PC. I think the popularity of the device tells us that the compatibility of Linux with Windows software, games especially, is good enough for the average person. It tells us that people are willing to tolerate a bit of a learning curve and some differences to what they're accustomed to so long as the value is there, and 95% of things just work.
It's also worth noting that many Steam Deck users choose to continue using SteamOS, based on Linux, to run their Windows games, in spite of the fact that their device will also run Windows.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Well, Asahi / Mesa developers demonstrated that they can "just support Vulkan" on Apple's hardware as the linked post explains. So Apple never had any excuse for not doing it. Their reasons for sabotaging Vulkan support were always political, not technical.
Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, t…
>if they used Vulkan, it would mean they wouldn't have to debug on a Mac.[...] Neither should or would be blindly trusting that things are portable I didn't mean this, just that you can actually run whatever shaders you compile rather than needing a Mac just to see your output. My point was that you would get "a smoother developer experience," which is true. > Vulkan/DX on AMD/NVIDIA also perform differently enough t…
> Yes, you do 'just click a button' to support MacOS in UE5, but there is still more to it than that.
Can you expand on this? What happens / doesn’t happen when clicking that button? Is debugging the additional effort, or incompatibilities?