Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

rosenzweig.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 372 posts

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#261

Post by filleduchaos »

DeathArrow wrote: post #247
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. Even if Apple supported Vulkan that doesn't mean AAA games would be ported to Mac soon. AAA require beefy GPUs and Apple silicon isn't going to match Nvidia.

I don't think I know a single AAA game released in the past decade that requires a beefier GPU than Apple ships. It would be complete financial suicide for a studio whose development budget runs in the tens and even hundreds of millions these days) to limit their customer base to the relative handful of gamers who have their hands on the latest and greatest graphics cards.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#262

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #126
dagmx wrote: post #81

Earlier 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…

> You then say that if they used Vulkan, it would mean they wouldn't have to debug on a Mac. This is overly optimistic. Sure, but supporting two variants of Vulkan is less work than having to support two incompatible APIs. It's not a binary thing.

The problem is that there isn't two variants, there is an extension soup of Vulkan variants.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#263

Post by pjmlp »

guipsp wrote: post #220
philistine wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only since version 10, as required API, it was optional between Android 7 and 10, and unless you are into Samsung or Google Pixel Android phones, good luck.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#264

Post by DeathArrow »

pjmlp wrote: post #260
DeathArrow wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The number of games that run on Metal by comparison (natively) is orders of magnitude higher. You mean iOS games?

It is still Metal, regardless.

But since there are more Android phones, there are more devices supporting Vulkan than devices supporting Metal.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#265

Post by pjmlp »

troupo wrote: post #140
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. 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…

Playstation has two API, GNM and GNMX, low level and high level variants.

Switch does have OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan support, however if you want the full power of the games console, you need to use NVN instead.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#266

Post by pjmlp »

guipsp wrote: post #224
troupo wrote: post #140

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. 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. This is only true if you forget how Vulkan came about.

[flagged]

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#267

Post by pjmlp »

robertoandred wrote: post #185
talldayo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Apple created OpenCL. It was nvidia who made everyone else avoid it.

Sure, sure, like Google, Intel and AMD aren't to blame for having made a mess out of OpenCL on their products.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#268

Post by ribit »

pcwalton wrote: post #125
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 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…

Bugs notwithstanding (which I agree are a significant concern for Metal), I'd frankly much prefer to work with a well-designed, streamlined API like Metal instead of a needlesly verbose and complex Vulkan.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#269

Post by SleepyMyroslav »

pjmlp wrote: post #259
_carbyau_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS coverage vs pure numbers is something for the game developer to be worried about, and by extension the game engine devs. You want to get into the iOS gaming market, go Metal. By definition you've expressed you don't care about the other OS's. You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs - though I will be delighted to be proven wrong when a AAA iP…

AAA don't care about Vulkan, they care about Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft proprietary APIs.

minor nitpick: did care when Google Stadia was in the list. But it did not worked out and everyone took a big L on that and now Vulkan support has been mostly purged already.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#270

Post by nox101 »

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.

Vulkan is the arguably worst of the modern GPU APIs. It's not all that portable since you have to check for sooo many differences in architecture. It requires the most amount of manual synchronization. It lacks a higher-level shading language (you generally have to pick a library that implements some other higher level language and let it generate SPIR-V for you and pray it works portably).

Except for projects like this, Vulkan really only exists on Linux and Android. It'a not really a thing on Windows. Sure, some games are using it, but they're like 1% or less.

Metal is arguably the best of the 3 APIs, though of course it was easier to do without having any legacy behind it and without being designed by committee.

Post reply on HN