11–20 of 23 posts
People jumping through hoops with smart tricks, because Apple are too stuck up to support Vulkan natively.
Apparently game devs have been doing just fine with middleware solution since the days of Atari.
Are metal GPU's good? I've admit for purely ideological reasons i've never really looked into how powerful they are
It is also the only native 3D API designed for managed languages, in Objective-C with Swift bindings.
DirectX is the land of COM, C++, write your own bindings, HLSL isn't quite C++, although is getting there.
Vulkan is the second coming of extension spaghetti, GLSL is stagnant to the point everyone was using HLSL instead, now there is Slang, still outside C and C++, write your own bindings.
LibGNM and LibGMX are basically C and C++ land, and PSGL is an evolution from HLSL.
NVN is a mix of OpenGL and Vulkan, and equally C and C++ land.
Then there are all the MetalKits, that no OS vendor has similar offerings.
People jumping through hoops with smart tricks, because Apple are too stuck up to support Vulkan natively.
Just wait when they hear about game consoles. Apparently game devs have been doing just fine with middleware solution since the days of Atari.
The announcement is pretty confusing since Mesa is used on Linux but Metal only exists on macOS/iOS. I guess this is only for Linux VMs running on macOS such as the Android emulator. Maybe it could also be used to run desktop Linux in a VM.
Mesa has taken a middleware role for quite some time now.
The announcement is pretty confusing since Mesa is used on Linux but Metal only exists on macOS/iOS. I guess this is only for Linux VMs running on macOS such as the Android emulator. Maybe it could also be used to run desktop Linux in a VM.
Mesa can be used on other operating systems. See https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Windows-Kopper-Progress for an example of using its OpenGL-to-Vulkan translator on Windows.
It weirdly sounds crazier than it is. Mike is an absolute legend for all of his work on Zink.
Edit: Clicked on your link and they are directly talking about work there. Serves me right for not reading it first.
People jumping through hoops with smart tricks, because Apple are too stuck up to support Vulkan natively.
The hardest part about supporting Apple systems is honestly everything else and no amount of Vulkan drivers is going to help with that.
People jumping through hoops with smart tricks, because Apple are too stuck up to support Vulkan natively.
I would rather Apple actively maintains Metal than halfheartedly support Vulkan the way they supported OpenGL. If you have a relatively good graphics abstraction layer in your engine already, implementing a Metal backend isn't super hard, especially if you already support Vulkan or D3D12. Metal is a lot like diet Vulkan/D3D12, except for a couple of really odd decisions. The hardest part about supporting Apple system…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would rather Apple actively maintains Metal than halfheartedly support Vulkan the way they supported OpenGL. If you have a relatively good graphics abstraction layer in your engine already, implementing a Metal backend isn't super hard, especially if you already support Vulkan or D3D12. Metal is a lot like diet Vulkan/D3D12, except for a couple of really odd decisions. The hardest part about supporting Apple system…
Apple aren't some resource lacking entity. They can support Vulkan properly and there is no excuse not to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple aren't some resource lacking entity. They can support Vulkan properly and there is no excuse not to.
Sure but in the meantime some of us have to actually keep shipping products and in that world I'd rather see Apple support their own thing that they are at least mildly interested in pushing forward.
They surely don't care about making things better for developers.