Slashdot Mirror
Vulkan Graphics is Coming To macOS and iOS, Will Enable Faster Games and Apps (anandtech.com)
The Khronos Group, a consortium of hardware and software companies, has announced that the Vulkan graphics technology is coming to Apple's platforms, allowing games and apps to run at faster performance levels on Macs and iOS devices. From a report: In collaboration with Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop, this free open-source collection includes the full 1.0 release of the previously-commercial MoltenVK, a library for translating Vulkan API calls to Apple's Metal 1 and 2 calls, as well LunarG's new Vulkan SDK for macOS. Funding the costs of open-sourcing, Valve has been utilizing these tools on their applications, noting performance gains over native OpenGL drivers with Vulkan DOTA 2 on macOS as a production-load example. Altogether, this forms the next step in Khronos' Vulkan Portability Initiative, which was first announced at GDC 2017 as their "3D Portability Initiative," and later refined as the "Vulkan Portability Initiative" last summer. Spurred by industry demand, Khronos is striving for a cross-platform API portability solution, where an appropriate subset of Vulkan can act as a 'meta-API'-esque layer to map to DirectX 12 and Metal; the holy grail being that developers can craft a single Vulkan portable application or engine that can be seamlessly deployed across Vulkan, DX12, and Metal supporting platforms.
"Metal" was the new standard that Apple was trying to push, "Vulkan" is the actual standard that got adopted by other people.
This means that people no longer need to go through the pointless process of converting their Vulkan code into Metal.
...easier to use than OpenGL...
I only want to clarify one thing: Vulkan is not easier ot use than OpenGL.
In fact Vulkan is much much more difficult and requires much much more setup. Vulkan is capable of being faster than OpenGL because Vulkan enables multi-threading the rendering commands rather than computing all the rendering commands in a single thread as OpenGL does it.
The reason Vulkan is more difficult to use compared to OpenGL is precisely because setting up a multi-threaded renderer is much more tricky to get right and requires way more in the way of boilerplate and you-just-have-to-already-know-what-you're-doing scaffolding in order to get places. Vulkan is much lower-level than OpenGL.
This post helps explain.