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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

You can't "just support Vulkan", it's too low level. To benefit, the implementation would have to target the GPU specifically since Apple GPUs are different from discrete GPUs.

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https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK proves that it is possible, but it is limited by having to go through Metal.

Anything's possible, but it wouldn't be performant. MoltenVK is just about as good as an untuned native Vulkan client would be.

If Apple would add native Vulkan support to macOS, it would most likely also go through a Metal "emulation layer" (just like their GL implementation, or the D3D12 implementation in the Game Porting Toolkit).

Because everyone knows from MoltenVK, Metal-based API implementations are just so efficient.

Well, Asahi / Mesa developers demonstrated that they can "just support Vulkan" on Apple's hardware as the linked post explains. So Apple never had any excuse for not doing it. Their reasons for sabotaging Vulkan support were always political, not technical.

Sabotaging? Metal came before Vulkan.

How does that stop Apple from supporting Vulkan on their system? It is pure political sabotaging. And you can't pull any excuses like "it requires effort". Apple have pools of cash to do the right thing for users and developers. They simply very intentionally oppose it due to their dinosaur lock-in mentality.

A blog post is different from a real compliant commercial implementation. Other reasons you couldn't do it include eg someone with a patent on it won't license it to you.

Mesa's implementation will get a compliance certification once it's ready. I don't see why they would have problems with that - other Vulkan drivers got compliance from Khronos once they passed needed tests. Patent FUDs are nonsense - no one else has such issues and many drivers already exist and work fine.

The real reasons are not good at all (i.e. Apple's obsession with lock-in) and have no excuse.

> A blog post is different from a real compliant commercial implementation.

honeykrisp is already a "real conformant" implementation and is listed on Khronos's website already.

https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...

You left out a word.

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