Vulkan to iOS and macOS

blueturtle13

PRESS RELEASE

MoltenVK brings Vulkan to iOS and macOS

Toronto, Jul 22, 2016: The Brenwill Workshop Ltd. announced that they will launch MoltenVK, an implementation of the Vulkan graphics API that runs on iOS and macOS, on Wednesday, July 27th, 2016, during the SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, California.

The Brenwill Workshop will also discuss and demonstrate MoltenVK at the Khronos Vulkan Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH.

MoltenVK is an implementation of the Vulkan graphics API that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS. In doing so, it extends the cross-platform availability of Vulkan to the iOS and macOS platforms.

With MoltenVK, game developers get the performance benefits and added debugging and performance tuning capabilities of the Metal framework on iOS and macOS, while maintaining compliance with Vulkan, the next-generation, open, cross-platform, industry-standard graphics API.

"Vulkan is the graphics industry's new open standard for predictable, high-performance graphics, and MoltenVK extends the cross-platform reach of Vulkan to the iOS and macOS platforms", said Bill Hollings, President of The Brenwill Workshop Ltd., the creators of MoltenVK.

More information about MoltenVK can be found at https://moltengl.com/moltenvk

Quizzical

It's probably better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine that this will work as well as if Apple supported Vulkan directly.  It could end up like using Wine to try to play DirectX games on Linux:  very hit and miss.

Torval

Quizzical said:

It's probably better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine that this will work as well as if Apple supported Vulkan directly.  It could end up like using Wine to try to play DirectX games on Linux:  very hit and miss.

I was thinking a very similar thing. I just can't see a compatibility API ending up well. They are interpretations of the original API and another layer that adds a hit to overhead and specifically response performance.

I'm not sure why Apple chose not to support Vulkan and went with Metal instead. I'll have to do a little looking around to see if I can find out some info on that. Regardless, I think it's a pretty significant hit to adoption, or at the very least complicates platform support rather than optimizing it.

Xeno.phon

Ahh MAC users, forever demanding that everything new in gaming be released for their system that has nothing to do with gaming nor was ever designed to do so. Its kind of like wanting to play video games and going out and buying a DVD player and getting mad cause it wont play your games. Its just not meant for gaming period, band aid it all you like.

Ridelynn

Apple put out Metal for a few good reasons:

It binds developers closer to the Apple platform if they choose to use it

They can tailor it very closely to the hardware (which they also design for iOS devices)

Apple had Metal out and available to developers before Vulkan was available, by almost 2 years

Apple has total control over the API specification, the software binaries, and to some degree, even the hardware for Metal. This is in contrast to Vulkan: Khronos just comes up with the specification, the GPU/driver developer has to create the binary (libraries/drivers/etc), the OS developer has to provide the hooks, there can be any extremely large number of combinations of different hardware installed from pretty large number of vendors, and the application developer has to put it all together.

There isn't any one or any thing saying that Apple is flat out refusing to support Vulkan, they may very well go back and add in Vulkan support to their GPU drivers one day (they are on the board of directors for Khronos after all). But right now, Metal has more benefits than Vulkan does, strictly speaking for Apple devices.

Apple is extremely slow when it comes to updating their GPU drivers (they develop their own graphics drivers in house). They are still several revisions behind on just plain OpenGL support, and have been for... pretty much ever. Their focus is not making games faster, it's making sure their platform experience is consistent and reliable.