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Vulkan SDK Now Formally Available for Apple Platforms - Including Apple Silicon Support

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 14 2021, @08:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the live-long-and-prosper dept.
Software

takyon writes:

Vulkan SDK Now Formally Available For Apple Platforms - Including Apple Silicon Support

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries.

With Apple still not officially backing Vulkan but preferring their own closed ecosystem of the Metal API, Vulkan on macOS/iOS platforms continue to rely on the MoltenVK portability layer that ultimately routes Vulkan over the Metal drivers.

With the Vulkan SDK now being formally available for Apple platforms, the hope is to ease Vulkan-on-macOS development by games / engine developers and other application developers.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by drussell on Thursday January 14 2021, @10:22PM (2 children)

    by drussell (2678) on Thursday January 14 2021, @10:22PM (#1100230) Journal

    Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and computing API. Vulkan targets high-performance realtime 3D graphics applications such as video games and interactive media across all platforms. Compared to OpenGL, Direct3D 11 and Metal, Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more balanced CPU/GPU usage. Other major differences from Direct3D 11 and OpenGL are Vulkan being a considerably lower-level API and offering parallel tasking. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is designed to allow developers to better distribute work among multiple CPU cores.

    and

    Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs as well as its predecessor, OpenGL. Vulkan offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and lower CPU usage. The overall concept and feature set of Vulkan is similar to Mantle later adopted by Microsoft with Direct3D 12 and Apple with Metal.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @12:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @12:29AM (#1100275)

      remove the metal from the first sentence and all is right. Who placed metal next to OpenGL and Direct3D 11 clearly didn't understand what metal is.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:14AM (#1100460)

      Those quotes arn't exactly false, but I do think it a poor choice to list metal there.

      Of the new generation APIs, we have, from lowest to highest level, Vulkan, Dx12, Metal, WebGpu.

      Metal is (a little) higher level than Vulkan and thus has somewhat higher overhead, however it is much more similar to Mantle, Vulkan and DX12 than it is to DX11 or OpenGL.

      I'm not particularly well informed on this subject, and my experience is mostly a couple years out-of date as well, and the whole high vs low level thing is a bit subjective (I mostly did it form the perspective of how the memory management worked in the particular code I worked on involving the APIs: it may not be representative).

      What I can say is I love Vulcan conceptually, and I tried and gave up coding against it because its a huge pain (My hello world triangle sample was hundreds of lines and had scattered TODOs in it). I think its mainly intended for authoring large/complex portable graphics engines, and its a real pain to do simple stuff with. I believe Metal tried to be more friendly for app authors as the cost of a little less control.

      Implementing Metal on Vulkan would probably work better than Vulkan on Metal, but both work well enough, and we do what we have to if we want stuff to port to the Apple ecosystem.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @04:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @04:51AM (#1100402)

    DirectX, is now dead? Video cards, are now crap? Why are we getting posts like this on the front page, I wonder? I mean, Apple? Who still uses Apple?

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