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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> AAA studios already adopted Metal on their engines

Genuine question : Do AAA studio really care about metal ? Is gaming on Mac a thing now ?

Not only gaming is a thing on Mac, more than on GNU/Linux or even BSD combined, it is also a thing on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, all with Metal support.

Also Apple's augmented reality is based on Metal, and they had Valve on stage praising it at WWDC, with native support on SteamVR SDK.

Finally, many of the frameworks that made use OpenGL, including the window manager, are now working on top of Metal.

Apple is using Metal because it's a modest improvement over OpenGL (in some areas; it's a regression in others) and, more importantly, their OpenGL implementation is extremely buggy.

You haven't said anything about Vulkan vs. Metal, and you can't, because Vulkan is a better API for the reasons I described upthread.

I can't say anything good about Vulkan, because I am not going to buy a new laptop or a Google Pixel just to try it out.

Then please stop saying it's a bad API.

Full disclosure: I have colleagues and friends on the Khronos standards group, and I don't like seeing their work bashed without specific technical reasons.

Where have I said it is a bad API?

I have said it has insignificant market share and that share won't get better outside GNU/Linux for the foreseeable future.

That has nothing to do with quality.

A good few of the major engines now support it.

Gaming on the Mac is a thing to some extent. See Steam for MacOS.

Game engine vendors also care a great deal about iOS, since they have a large number of customers who do, so that's also driving support for Metal in those engines.

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