551–560 of 650 posts
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Do you have a source for your claim?
Lack of known good reasons, and their major infamy in perpetuating lock-in in general. They have only themselves to blame for being seen in negative light in this topic by default.
Anything that's not based on the Vulkan spec is just a land-grab by Apple to push their own technologies. As someone who spends a lot of time in that space I don't really see what this is solving, WebGL is good enough and anyone serious about performance/compute are going to drop down to native anyway.
> As someone who spends a lot of time in that space I don't really see what this is solving, WebGL is good enough and anyone serious about performance/compute are going to drop down to native anyway. Not true at all; if your primary performance bottleneck is the GPU code, not CPU code, you could use a better web API modeled after Vulkan, for the same reason people switch from GL to Vulkan. In general, if there's ever…
Problem is you cannot get anything close to that on any reasonable sampling of OpenGL platforms, in anything close to working condition. At best you just end up using the degenerate subset of APIs that can actually work across all your targeted systems - for a fully cross-platform title, that would include Android, and probably limit you to OpenGL ES 2. If you drop mobile, it would be around OpenGL 3.1-3.3. If you throw out some hardware as new as 2012, you could get stuck at Apple's last supported (which is buggy and broken all the same) OpenGL at 4.1. You can throw out Apple, and get stuck at recent Windows AMD and Intel support around 4.2.
But that is the best case - where you don't then pick your target and find out all the drivers are broken in a dozen different ways each for the extensions you are using.
It is only OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 that Khronos has required conformance testing for certification for, and very few people are targeting those for development because of how limited a subset of the market actually supports them.
So that is the point where you throw the whole mess out and just use Vulkan - which only has one major release version, and has 3 feature support levels you can pick from, with conformance testing for all of them.
If Apple has like 4% of the OS market and seems to be abandoning the desktop, why do we really care what Apple thinks?
Because of the fact they helped usher in the modern web with WebKit and they're the ones in charge of this very popular thing called iOS?
Re: iOS being popular; You're in a bubble, the iOS market share as of 2016Q3 is 12.5%.
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We are working on many of the things you list. We are able to work on more than one thing at a time though.
The features on that list are industry standard everywhere else. You 'working' on them is not entirely convincing. The sudden interest in a web graphics api is somewhat conspicuous coming from a company known not to adhere to web standards. There must be some reason for apples sudden interest in this stuff. Knowing apple they're interest probably isn't aligned with their users interest.
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We think the eventual shader language will not be based on MSL. We need both source and binary formats, and MSL doesn't even have a public binary format at this time. However, if we do end up with something MSL-inspired, the same commitment to follow the Patent Policy would apply.
I think it's a sane expectation to use something that is both open and already available. GLSL, SPIR-V and etc. Using something like MSL won't go anywhere, if there won't be comparable, open and freely available implementation already. You should take that idea seriously, if you want to view it as a truly collaborative project that invites everybody's participation. I.e using MSL from the start was a major mistake.
I'd like to see Apple implement Safari's missing functionality before they try and come up with a replacement for WebGL. Where are getUserMedia, MediaRecorder, WebRTC, filesystem, vibration, screen orientation, Service Workers, Web Bluetooth ? What about WebGL 2? I'm sure there are a few more I missed too. Those are things that are really holding the web browsing experience back on iOS/MacOS, not an extra 20% 3D perf…
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> tuned to his needs Is there a specific person you're talking about, or just a programmer in general? Does this have to be male, or are women also allowed to code? I can only imagine the type of flack I'll get for raising this hear, but I find it difficult to parse sentences that are overly specific about a general collective of people. There's no need to mention gender here - consider using something like "they" in…
Sorry, not a native English speaker here. In my native German, it is usually proper to use the male form for the undetermined gender. This might leak into my use of the English language. I would be happy, if you could rephrase the offending sentence in correct gender-neutral English, so I could avoid this mistake in future.
It is so sad to see this whole discussion. Because I usually think, HN is different, from the angry, uninformed mobs out "on the streets". I mean, I don't know much about low level graphic API's, I read about them, but I don't work with them directly. But apparently most of the people here don't know either! They basically seem to know that they like open standards (so do I) and that Vulkan is a open Standard and the…
These are good points, but here are some more to consider: - Apple, particularly recently, have been terrible on supporting modern web proposals. Worse than anyone. Much worse than the typical historical reputational lower bar that is Microsoft. - Apple's record on proposing new web standards has been demonstrably aggressively anti-open and not generally condusive to promoting interop https://www.w3.org/2012/te-pag/p…
Not really. Because yes, it is well known that Apple closes down their system and wants full controll over it and locks other partys out. One of the Reasons for me, to not buy them.
But what does this have to do, when they propose a new Web API? If Apple chooses to go a different way with metal (and a way apparently quite some devs like), than I don't see much point in trying to force them to go another way. Maybe metal is even superior - I can't judge that, but I am not going to say vulkan is superior, just because it is open(even though I would like it to be superior just for that fact). ButI don't see much point in dragging Web-Technologys into these discussion in the first place.
Especially since apparently it is possible to implement the proposed WebGPU on top of metal, vulkan or Direct3D !!
And even though "Cross-compilation efforts will invariably be made easier with a more consistent API between (web and native) platforms." is true , it is not gonna happen at the moment, since simply not everybody wants vulkan at the moment, but 2 major players stick with something else. And I am not sure it is only for power reasons, but maybe also for technical reasons, as I read from quite some devs, that working with vulcan is huge pain(and they prefer metal, if it would be open) .... as it is not made for working with it directly, but rather to be worked through a higher level API. So ... is there a different proposal for that higher level API than WebGPU to be discussed right now?
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These are good points, but here are some more to consider: - Apple, particularly recently, have been terrible on supporting modern web proposals. Worse than anyone. Much worse than the typical historical reputational lower bar that is Microsoft. - Apple's record on proposing new web standards has been demonstrably aggressively anti-open and not generally condusive to promoting interop https://www.w3.org/2012/te-pag/p…
"Before you even start considering the pros and cons of Vulkan or WebVulkan, there's a very blatant case of cui bono to examine behind this." Not really. Because yes, it is well known that Apple closes down their system and wants full controll over it and locks other partys out. One of the Reasons for me, to not buy them. But what does this have to do, when they propose a new Web API? If Apple chooses to go a differe…
The web being inherently cross-platform in nature there's a motivation on their part to not support it, or - in this case - cripple it (perhaps to a mild degree but at least enough to render it categorically inferior to native metal and not worth the trade-offs). I can't say that their proposal does this necessarily, but there's inarguably a motivation to do so.
For a previous obvious example of this kind of thing, see the deliberate crippling of iOS UIWebView.
> I am not sure it is only for power reasons, but maybe also for technical reasons
Call me a cynic, but while there may be good, valid technical arguments against Vulkan, it's mainly for power reasons.
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Consumers don't appear to be bothered by any of those missing freedoms.
Consumers are bothered by games that get released much later (or not at all) on iOS instead of Android, or the other way around. They're not directly bothered by the cause, but they sure as hell hate the symptoms.