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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

#181

Post by robertoandred »

shmerl wrote: post #179
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.

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.

Sabotaging? Metal came before Vulkan.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#182

Post by rowanG077 »

kbolino wrote: post #149
rowanG077 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAA gaming is THE driving factor for getting Vulkan on Asahi. There really are only a tiny subset of games that require a kernel anti cheat. Let alone the wealth of single player games.

I'd love to hear about all these DRM-free single-player AAA games. If you're talking about older games, then maybe we're just talking past each other; I assumed we were talking about recent AAA games.

They don't have to be DRM-free.Here you can play all of these on linux: https://www.protondb.com/explore

Highlights include Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3 and God of War.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#183

Post by wlesieutre »

LucidLynx wrote: post #24
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…

> The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. Yep, that's unfortunately true... https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/

Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well

> Vulkan Renderer has now been enabled in Star Citizen. This new renderer will be off by default but has been added to the Graphics settings menu. In this first release, the focus is on hardware/driver issues, stability, and any major performance issues. At this point we do not expect Vulkan to be outperforming D3D11 on the CPU usage due to the fact we haven't enabled multi-threading of the rendering submission yet, but do expect CPU performance to be within a 30% margin. Once we have multi-threading enabled we expect a significant net-gain. On the GPU side we should be closer to parity.

> Performance improvements and stability improvements will be on-going throughout 3.23, with the aim to make Vulkan the default and more performant implementation in a following release. In the meantime we appreciate any and all feedback towards this.

> Additionally, you may see a few new folders now in Star Citizen's appdata. These relate to our new Graphics Settings file (just includes the Graphics Renderer setting for now), Vulkan's Shader Cache, and Vulkan's Pipeline Cache.

> We are currently working with AMD and Nvidia to improve functionality and compatibility for later Driver Releases. It is recommended that you update to the latest GPU drivers for this release but there are still a few known issues that could cause instability and crashes with Vulkan until a later AMD/Nvidia Driver update. If you run into major issues you may want to swap back to DX 11. If the game crashes on launch after switching to Vulkan, you can reset this by deleting your shader folders in %localappdata%\Star Citizen

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//19915-Star-Cit...

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#184

Post by shmerl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #183
LucidLynx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. Yep, that's unfortunately true... https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/

Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well > Vulkan Renderer has now been enabled in Star Citizen. This new renderer will be off by default but has been added to the Graphics settings menu. In this first release, the focus is on hardware/driver issues, stability, and any major performance issues. A…

> Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well

Does it work well in Wine on Linux with Vulkan renderer now? I tried a long time ago and I was waiting for their Vulkan option to revisit it.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#185

Post by robertoandred »

talldayo wrote: post #163
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. 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.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#186

Post by shmerl »

robertoandred wrote: post #181
shmerl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#187

Post by robertoandred »

coldpie wrote: post #67
jandrese wrote: post #52

Earlier 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...

It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.

32-bit is the only change that actually broke anything, and it had been deprecated for a decade.

64-bit OpenGL/x86 games work fine on ARM.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#188

Post by wlesieutre »

shmerl wrote: post #184
wlesieutre wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well > Vulkan Renderer has now been enabled in Star Citizen. This new renderer will be off by default but has been added to the Graphics settings menu. In this first release, the focus is on hardware/driver issues, stability, and any major performance issues. A…

> Star Citizen is another one recently moving to Vulkan, they just rolled it out as a graphics option in 3.23, and it's slated to replace DX11 once it's working well Does it work well in Wine on Linux with Vulkan renderer now? I tried a long time ago and I was waiting for their Vulkan option to revisit it.

Haven't tried it, but this person says no

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1cl0bwn/star_c...

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#189

Post by mschuster91 »

> Some formats are implicitly reordered. Common “BGRA” formats swap red and blue for historical reasons.

JFC that brings up nasty memories dealing with OpenCV. One might think this kind of stuff would be solved by now and people would have converged on something sane, but no, it isn't...

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#190

Post by ttoinou »

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…

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 best user experience, each platform having its customized architecture.

After all, scientists don’t write much CUDA oriented for game development anymore or custom maths shaders, they have their own CUDA libraries helping them in their own domains better than what a gamedev orienter Vulkan would do. Any percent shaved off developer time and running time is worth a lot of money.

The Apple Metal platform surely is customized to the needs of Apple, its devices and its users ultimate needs, in a way Vulkan will never be. Unified memory on recent Apple silicon M1 M2 M3 where RAM and VRAM are somehow merged.

Maybe the society of worldwide developers had better things to do than spend precious time on Vulkan.

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