Vulkan to iOS and macOS

Comments

• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499

  July 2016

  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.
• Xeno.phon Member UncommonPosts: 350

  July 2016

  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 Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  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.