Vulkan Applications Enabled on Apple Platforms

khronos.org

37 points·MBCook··6 comments

I think this is fantastic news to combat the fragmentation across platforms (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), and allow people to move on past the lowest common denominator (outdated OpenGL [ES])!

> The Khronos Vulkan Portability Initiative continues to refine and define a universally portable subset of Vulkan 1.0 that can be run at native performance levels over Metal and DirectX 12 drivers. Released into open source today is the MoltenVK library from The Brenwill Workshop, which translates calls within the Vulkan portable subset to underlying Metal calls on macOS and iOS. MoltenVK uses the open source SPIRV-Cross cross-compiler to translate Vulkan shaders into underlying native code formats. MoltenVK is being made freely available for all developers, with no fees or royalties needed to ship commercial applications.

So it's Vulkan on top of Metal. Should performance be ok?

Early indications[0] show it appears to be okay, and by okay, I mean better than Apple's OpenGL stack.

This is a subset of Vulkan, but it appears to be a broad enough subset to enable at least some game developers to more or less use the same code base.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-...

At least Dota runs faster in Mac via this than via OpenGL. https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=vulkan-on-mac&i... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=vulkan-o...

It's specifically a subset of Vulkan that can run with essentially zero round-trip penalty. The subset is almost all of Vulkan anyway.

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