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Comment by nercht12 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it makes no sense. The standard is OpenGL, Vulkan, but Apple ditches it just to be different or something. At least some big game engines support it, e.g. OGRE, so if you do want cross-platform dev, it's possible.

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To be fair, Metal came before and inspired the development of Vulkan.

But like USB-C, at some point you should just embrace the industry standard.

At least USB-C vs Lightning had the dilemma of one phone physically not being able to use both.

Industry standard where? Not for games.

Even the cross-platform stuff tends to not support Mac as well. Like CSGO had a Mac version like the other Source-engine games, but it never worked quite right on Mac. I had input lag and inconsistent framerates, and it's not that I cared about winning, but the game was painful to play like that. Game was perfect on the same machine running Windows via Boot Camp.

Also, there's Vulkan on Metal, but there's translation overhead, and I have no idea what other issues it causes. Dolphin emulator did some research on that.

Nope, OpenGL and Vulkan are not standards embraced by game developers other than famous folks like Carmack pushing for it, and even him has acknowledged DirectX being much better.

Game consoles don't do Khronos APIs for the most part, they are really only standard on GNU/Linux and Android, really.

Indeed DirectX is king, but OpenGL and Vulkan aren't nothing. There was a long period of time, maybe 2000-2016, when high-budget games being released for Mac wasn't so uncommon, or at least it was more common than today, and those often used OpenGL. Instead of Apple rallying around the only alternatives to DirectX, they made yet another way. I'm assuming Mac games are just not a priority for Apple, which is fine.

Their priority are iDevice games.

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