Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

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> Apple had to remain the jerks they are and not support Vulcan natively

Thats a rather immature view of the technology world that smacks of the tired old tribal warfare notions that only internet forums believe in.

Apple had a technical problem of slow, bloated and battery-draining OpenGL API and they solved it using Metal more than 18 months ago, when no other viable alternative was on the horizon. Are they jerks because they didn't saddle their users with a technically inferior solution for even longer?

Khronos has let OpenGL evolve into a byzantine beast of an API with GPU vendors effectively segmenting it into multiple complicated variants of best practices (like AZDO and others). Vulkan was announced more than two years ago, but unless you were in a select inner circle of developers, there was no actionable information available, until today.

In the meantime, major commercial engines already have official support for Metal (or Unity will have it soon). Popular games like World of Warcraft already have betas using Metal. I can download free IDE, documentation, sample profiling and debugging tools for developing Metal applications.

Sad truth is that Kronos and the Vulkan group took too long to evolve OpenGL and to give developers any actionable specifications for Vulkan.

> Are they jerks because they didn't saddle their users with a technically inferior solution for even longer?

Em no, they are jerks because they never updated OpenGL implementation on OS X (which still is generally 30% or so slower than Windows implementation on same hardware, not to mention lacking of full 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 OpenGL support) then implementing a new proprietary API on the desktop with huge fanfare and marketing about being "30%-50% faster" (or in other words - as fast as OpenGL is on Windows). Meanwhile, OpenGL implementation is still rotten as of 2016 at 2010 OpenGL 4.1 levels with no update.

Leaving an open implementation of a 3D standard to rot in performance limbo and then bringing in a new proprietary standard which has to be used to get competitive performance does bring the word "jerks" to mind.

> Thats a rather immature view of the technology

And you think lock-in is a mature approach to technology? It is not. And lock-in is the only reason why Apple pushed Metal instead of joining the Vulkan effort. Unless you are trying to claim that they just couldn't plan things and ended up with their own NIH despite Vulkan emerging in the background. But that doesn't fly, since they could have corrected it when they realized where things are moving. So "no ill intent" reasoning here doesn't sound convincing.

Metal predates Vulcan by any measure. It was the first publicly available low level graphics API and once they released it that have an obligation to support it. It was released, what, 4 months after aMD announced mantle? That's not enough time to develop and deploy an entirely new API, from my memory Vulkan was more a response to Metal, DX12 and Mantle.

> Metal predates Vulcan by any measure.

See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11112078

This "Metal predates Vulkan" argument is getting old already since it's historically incorrect.

> It was released, what, 4 months after aMD announced mantle? That's not enough time to develop and deploy an entirely new API, from my memory Vulkan was more a response to Metal, DX12 and Mantle.

You remember it wrong. Again, see the link above.

I'm not seeing a timeline in your link above.

According to Wikipedia's Vulkan article [1], "The Khronos Group began a project to create a next generation graphics API in July 2014..."

Wikipedia's Metal article [2] links to the presentation from WWDC 2014 (the first week in June 2014) where Metal was introduced. Apple doesn't ever per-announce APIs-- at this time Metal was available for developers to use.

The Mantle article [3] says AMD developed Mantle "...starting in 2013" (the referenced Forbes article is from September 2013.) I'm doubting this was ample notice for Apple to have elected to write Metal, design it, and implement it nearly completely for June 2014. However, I'd concede it is certainly possible (Apple just doesn't seem that nimble to me.)

I'd be interested in reading anything more authoritative than a comment board on the impetus behind what seems to be an industry-wide decision to create these lower-level APIs.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#History

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)

Their resemblance in design is just stunning and claiming it's accidental would be stretching that chance way too far. There were some documents published which even highlighted how early DX12 documentation was almost a verbatim clone of the Mantle one with only few minor changes.

You wouldn't find official documentation on AMD dealing with Apple and MS, because it was private. But you can clearly deduce that both Apple and MS had access to Mantle when designing their APIs by comparing them. It's even possible that AMD did some of the work for them.

Also, AMD never hid their intention to make Mantle open. They voiced it early on. So Apple and MS both new that would happen when they started working on Metal and DX12. And that's exactly what happened when AMD gave Mantle to Khronos. Vulkan essentially is an iteration over Mantle. Same as DX12 and Metal are.

Even if you assume it all happened by pure chance, and the stunning resemblance of design is just because many different people had the same way of thought - it's not going to explain why MS and Apple couldn't back Vulkan once they figured out where things are moving.

Well, not by 'any' measure (as others have pointed out). Additionally, do you find Metal to be a wholly unique creation? It certainly 'borrows' ideas from other low level mobile GPU APIs out there...

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