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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

#211

Post by aurareturn »

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).

  Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store.
This is implied already when I said Apple wants the AAA game to be on iPhone and iPad. By definition, the game has to be on the App Store.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#212

Post by jppittma »

nemomarx wrote: post #209
dev_tty01 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more. I'm not sure "more" is the right term here. There are about 1.3 billion iPhone users worldwide. Sure, Vulkan covers more OS environments, but how important is that to a game developer vs. total available users? Does Vulkan user reach exceed 1.3 billion?

How many iphone users will pay 60 dollars for a game, like you can try and achieve on Steam or Switch? I feel like the iOS game market is pretty different.

More money is spent/made made on iOS gaming than on traditional PC gaming, even if the $60 up front model isn't something iOS users are willing to accept. I almost think they're right to tolerate mtx models btw. At least if games are f2p, companies aren't releasing them broken/unfinished.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#213

Post by pcwalton »

ttoinou wrote: post #190
pcwalton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vulkan probably wouldn't help macOS gaming from a users' point of view, but it sure would be nice for us engine developers. There aren't many Vulkan games , but the big 3 non-in-house game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) are all committed to supporting Vulkan in addition to Metal, so we (collectively, the engine dev community) currently have to support both. Dropping Metal would reduce the amount of engineer time spen…

Interesting point of view that could also be the other way around, Vulkan support being a hidden tax for the love of open source and free software rather than something really useful the market needed on top of others APIs / GPU architectures / platforms, pushed by a subset / minority of developers more ideological than practical grounded developers who accept that competition of private standards will bring out the…

You're confusing device-specific APIs with OS-specific APIs. There's a big difference. DX11, DX12, Metal, etc. are themselves all abstraction layers over what are in some cases very different hardware designs. (This will eventually become less so with Apple moving to in-house GPUs, but for now it's still true--Metal targets NVIDIA and AMD GPUs as well as Apple's M1/M2s.)

Maybe it'd be interesting to contemplate a world in which red team, green team, and blue team all have their own proprietary APIs and there are no cross-vendor abstractions, but that's not what we're discussing here.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#214

Post by pcwalton »

talldayo wrote: post #196
ttoinou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point of view that could also be the other way around, Vulkan support being a hidden tax for the love of open source and free software rather than something really useful the market needed on top of others APIs / GPU architectures / platforms, pushed by a subset / minority of developers more ideological than practical grounded developers who accept that competition of private standards will bring out the…

It feels unlikely. Much smaller companies (Broadcom, Qualcomm) have no trouble writing compliant Vulkan drivers (let alone singular people), so I find it hard to give Apple the pass here. Assuming good faith on their part, Vulkan should be available; or at least some kind of cross-platform API target. Otherwise people are just going to ignore Mac and keep focusing on DirectX, like the status quo. Vulkan is everyone's…

> the only feasible explanation is that Apple is hoping to somehow force developers into using Metal natively

I'm told the problem is some legal spat between Apple and Khronos that has led to a "no Khronos standards anywhere at Apple" policy. I don't know the details beyond that.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#215

Post by jppittma »

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).

The only way I can see that happening is with an EEE model. You'd go grab all of the non-steam publishers and come up with a standard format that'd mean that studios can push to every platform in a standardized way, then bank on nobody bothering to install steam because the app store already has all of the games you want, and it's installed by default.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#216

Post by astrange »

shmerl wrote: post #186
robertoandred wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabotaging? Metal came before Vulkan.

How does that stop Apple from supporting Vulkan on their system? It is pure political sabotaging. And you can't pull any excuses like "it requires effort". Apple have pools of cash to do the right thing for users and developers. They simply very intentionally oppose it due to their dinosaur lock-in mentality.

A blog post is different from a real compliant commercial implementation. Other reasons you couldn't do it include eg someone with a patent on it won't license it to you.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#217

Post by [deleted] »

dagmx wrote: post #16
talldayo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't ship Game Porting Toolkit with your game, though. DXVK doesn't have this limitation, and developers use it all the time. In effect, this means the number of games you get with native Vulkan coverage is a magnitude higher than the total sum of all Metal-native desktop titles.

This isn't completely true. Crossover is allowed to ship the GPTK components for API translation (which they currently do as of 23.5) and games are allowed to embed Crossover elements like they did in the pre-Metal days with Cider etc. All this talk of DXVK doesn’t explain why games based on engines with native metal support aren’t on a Mac either.

[deleted]

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#218

Post by astrange »

58028641 wrote: post #207
astrange wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK proves that it is possible, but it is limited by having to go through Metal.

Anything's possible, but it wouldn't be performant. MoltenVK is just about as good as an untuned native Vulkan client would be.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#219

Post by MindSpunk »

out_of_protocol wrote: post #75
dagmx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vulkan has nothing to do with the Steam Deck being able to run PC games other than being the API that DXVK and VKD3D-proton translate DirectX calls into. Vulkan isn’t the magic bullet, it’s just another API in the stack. The “magic” is the phenomenal amount of effort that has gone into those DirectX translation libraries.

Vulkan makes the work easier, but it is not what makes those games portable.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#220

Post by guipsp »

philistine wrote: post #148
troupo wrote: post #142

Earlier 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.

Not true on either users, number of games, or hours played.

Remember, android exists, and supports vk.

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