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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Metal is the main reason many games are never ported to MacOS.

Metal is roughly equivalent to Vulkan, which is on Windows and Linux. But Apple just had to Think Different. So all the major rendering libraries either have a layer which abstracts over Vulkan and Metal, or they don't support MacOS at all.

That's what WGPU does. If it were not for Apple ignoring standards, much of that would be unnecessary. It adds so much excess baggage that the consensus is to go direct to Vulkan or DX12, and blow off MacOS support.

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If Apple actually wanted to bring games to MacOS, they'd give Valve and CodeWeavers a billion dollars and get the Steam Client working, put tons of effort into a d3dvk-for-Metal solution, and have it working with as little overhead as possible. They don't do this because they can't funnel them through the App Store. The graphics API they use for the operating isn't relevant (Vulkan isn't used very much for most games.)

The funny thing is that with the rise of Proton and Steam Deck driving its development -- there's literally no reason anymore for a game developer to ever target any "Desktop PC" platform except x86_64 Portable Executable files, using DirectX. Because Proton will just handle the port with nearly zero effort. Even on ARM64 devices like Snapdragon, the CPU is often not the limiting factor (and binary translation is only in the realm of 15%) so emulation for games is totally viable if the GPU can handle the load.

There is no such thing as "the one true gaming graphics API"

Windows/Xbox uses Direct3D, Mac/iDevices use Metal, PlayStation uses GNM/GNMX, Nintendo Switch uses NVN.

Compared to DirectX, Vulkan is barely used at all in gaming, except on Linux and the most recent subset of Android devices.

If it weren't for Proton's DirectX emulation running on top on Vulkan, Vulkan would be largely irrelevant, from a "widely used in real world gaming" perspective.

> Apple just had to Think Different.

Metal is 1.7 years older than Vulkan. (June 2014 versus February 2016)

Does Metal allow for better performance with Apple hardware than if Vulcan were the “direct” interface, if you optimize with it?

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