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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

#301

Post by lonjil »

SoothingSorbet wrote: post #231
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 Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it. Secondly, it does not have to be _native_, on top of Vulkan you can run OpenGL and Direct3D emulation layers, which will cover most of the rest. macOS has long since abandoned their native OpenGL drivers, and MoltenVK has many caveats.

> Firstly, several games engines and rendering libraries support it.

So? If no one is using that support to ship PC games using Vulkan, who cares? Those same engines all support Metal, so clearly this is irrelevant to the question of Mac gaming.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#302

Post by lonjil »

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.

You've got it backwards. Before M1, most Macs that regular consumers owned were incredibly bad GPU-wise. M1 was an enormous upgrade and finally made Mac usable for gaming for the average Mac owner. But years of most Macs being useless for gaming drove the game devs away.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#303

Post by saagarjha »

astrange wrote: post #80
coldpie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.

You don't need indoor hobbies when the weather is this nice.

It's the warmest first week of June in a while in Cupertino, so I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to nice weather.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#304

Post by saagarjha »

kmeisthax wrote: post #236
skrrtww wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a problem even for macOS updates, ever since they moved to the sealed system volume in macOS 11. When you update macOS, it downloads the entire OS and installs it to a separate APFS snapshot. The infuriating thing about this is that the sealed system volume should actually make it easier to provide reliable delta updates, but instead they used it as an excuse to remove them. And of course Apple's always treat…

I am pretty sure App Store updates are smarter than that. For example Xcode delta installs have taken far less space (though they take a lot longer) if you grab them from the App Store.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#305

Post by ttoinou »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #288
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…

> 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. There's no clean answer here. You push that mentality of "Customers first" too hard, and you get the PS3; an unwieldy architecture that devs are forced to support but end up with worse ports than the Xbox 360. The customer doe…

   not making developers duplicate their work for every new private business is at least a starting point.
Im sure we all understand the benefits of a unified API / same abstraction layer. It’s about how the abstraction is leaking in real life and how to squeeze every last percent of developer’s experience and final application speed

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#306

Post by troupo »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #232
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?

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…

> You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs

Likewise you don't care about Vulkan. You care about DirectX and whatever Playstation has

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#307

Post by DiskoHexyl »

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.

Lack of Vulkan support is just one (small) reason gaming doesn't really exist on Mac.

IMO it's more down to Apple's historic view on videogames and software compatibility in general- they are okay with frequently breaking things (like they did with 32bit apps) and expect developers to just constantly accomodate that. With a giant iOS market and its deluge of relatively small free-to-play/service-based games, it's a worthy model for devs to pursue (until the game is unprofitable, and then, in a couple of years, it's delisted as incompatible).

For a more traditional desktop/console style gaming, where a long tail is expected, with little further support, it's a tough proposition to release on a platform that has a miniscule market share AND constantly breaks. Its own graphics API is just a cherry on top, I think

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#308

Post by troupo »

talldayo wrote: post #235
kalleboo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple went up on stage and announced Lightning, they said "this is our connector for the next 10 years". 10 years later, almost on the dot, they replaced Lightning on the iPhone with USB-C. Doesn't seem weird at all to me.

It wouldn't be weird if they simply picked one side and stuck with it. They put USB-C on Mac, because obviously Lightning couldn't fill the role they wanted with Thunderbolt. And then they made iPhones Lightning because... they wanted to sell IP to cable manufacturers. And they made the Magic Trackpad/Keyboard accessories use Lightning because... why again? It's just USB, it probably takes more work to make a Lightni…

When they made Lightning USB didn't even have an agreed-upon charging standard. Much less all the other requirements Apple had for the cable.

Do not try and pretend that USB was any good when Lightning was announced. And even USB-C is a mess of conflicting and confusing optional specifications.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#309

Post by Dylan16807 »

philistine wrote: post #147
eptcyka wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were the (one of the) first ones to usb-c on laptops. I don’t think they were ever planning to do usb-c on the iPhone, they had no reason to be this late.

Apple did USB-C on the iPad before the Europeans forced them to do USB-C at all. They could have kept developing Lighting, it supported USB-3 speeds for one device (the first iPad Pro), but they instead chose to rally around the common standard. USB-C on phones was a certainty, it was clear to everyone. The problem is not that Apple didn't want to standardize, it's that they didn't want to be forced. In the history o…

They did the exact opposite of rally. USB-C on iPhone took an extra eight years. Even if I agree it was a "certainty", that's far too long.

They did not want to standardize. The idea of forcing them didn't come up in any significant way until after they proved that.

And I don't know what their laziness about USB 3 is supposed to prove. They didn't consider 3 support necessary for USB-C either.

Re: Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month

#310

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

What happens if we exclude games that could run in a browser canvas with no webgl support? They don't really benefit from the API choice.
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