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.

Comments

Re:Another new standard

[Anonymous Coward]

My recollection was they got so fed up waiting for the Khronos Group to start real discussions about "OpenGL-next gen" they just got on with it, then Vulkan turned up. The article (and a lot of people on the internet, shocking that) in part try's to re-write history so it appears Apple ignored a standard (and a complete one at that...) because there evil and not playing nice (Umm OpenCL...CUDA...anyone) but at the time it didn't exist so what were they to do?

It will be interesting to see what Apple does next.

Re:Can someone explain Vulkan?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But comparing Vulkan to OpenGL may be a little bit like comparing Xlib+X Toolkit Intrinsics against XCB. You get less stuff done for you but at least you can *finally* implement it correctly.