Vulkan is coming to macOS and iOS, but no thanks to Apple

From Apple's perspective it's probably worth a try to get lock-in! Their real leverage is iOS, which lots of games want to target.

I do agree that this time it might be different. There's no great cross-platform open-spec solution for, say, EventKit, so when Apple offers up their own API, we've just gone with it. Game Developers are a huge existing community, in a way that Calendar Developers are not. Metal and Vulkan are an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

As someone who learned to program in the 1980's, it's pretty amazing that it's getting feasible to target high-performance graphics on every major platform from a single code base. Targeting every user in the world using only 2 graphics libraries doesn't seem so terrible to me. Consider how different the "Lemmings" source code must have been for Commodore Amiga versus the Commodore C=64, for example, not to mention the other 25 platforms it was ported to.

They probably figure, if developers are willing to do it for DirectX, they'll be willing to do it for Metal also / instead.

And such studios prefer APIs that fully expose the hardware, and then build their own abstractions, than something that hides that extra performance features.

All major AAA game engines already support Metal.

>At the time that DirectX was created Microsoft also largely controlled the OpenGL standard, the success of DirectX in gaming caused Microsoft to largely lose interest in OpenGL leaving it in the hands of the 3D chip OEM’s to advance as an open standard that they could use to pressure Microsoft to implement features they wanted in DirectX. Apple’s adoption of OpenGL and subsequent active participation on the ARB breathed life into OpenGL in mobile gaming because Apple’s iPhone implementation of OpenGL became the “standard” that other mobile phone and chip vendors had to emulate if they wanted to get IOS games ported to their devices. Without some form of “standard” hardware definition, OpenGL drivers and media drivers in general are often just a grab bag of broken inconsistent functionality. Of course in the absence of a “DirectX” like media API of their own design, Apple had little choice but to jump on the OpenGL bandwagon and ride it for gaming, but clearly it is not to Apple’s competitive advantage to be propping up OpenGL support in mobile for all of their competitors. Just as it did for Microsoft, creating their own proprietary gaming API’s is entirely in Apple’s strategic interest…. Why help Android siphon off their game developers by propping up OpenGL?

https://web.archive.org/web/20140606055700/http://www.alexst...

Nobody is expecting Microsoft to add native Vulkan drivers on Windows, why would that be expected of Apple?

[citation needed]

Not that they have their own API, but that it's at all better or faster than Vulkan. Remember Vulkan primarily came from AMD's Mantle. It's not the creation of a committee catering to the lowest common denominator.

And no, it's not only CAD still stuck on OpenGL. Games use it, too. Most of mobile is also on OpenGL ES. Increasingly more of them use it than they used to, even, as increasingly games are using off-the-shelf engines that are already cross-platform and have an OpenGL back-end.

The single largest consumer OS in the world (Android) only supports OpenGL ES & Vulkan, even, with no proprietary graphics API of any kind.

True but console is a different beast though, it seems you are focused on that not just mobile which was always just OpenGL ES mainly since '07 until Metal entered the arena.

On consoles/custom handhelds, they have always had their own frameworks to get the most out of their custom hardware and for lock-in exclusives, to compete and advance their hardware as far as possible for the console lifeline, to sell as many games as possible as the hardware ages as game content is where they made profit. Consoles have modified versions of frameworks or their own like gcm from Sony. They do support standard ones but mostly people use the custom ones to get the most out of the hardware and the hardware makers like that.

On desktop, only two essentially in DirectX and OpenGL and was that way for a long time. Portability was fine, DX windows, OpenGL everything else but DX was the major one due to Windows desktop dominance.

On mobile, OpenGL ES on the major mobile platforms, iOS and Android, pretty much the only one since '07 until Metal.

As I mentioned in other areas, not a huge deal to game developers who aren't building their own engine but portability does matter on desktop and mobile, not just consoles which have reasons for custom rendering engines/toolkits.

IMO, this is a common misconception. Or, at least, the extrapolation of it is. Vulkan might require a lot of code to initialize, and has extra responsibilities related to memory management, synchronization, etc., but in my experience the end product doesn't require significantly more code than other graphics APIs. The up-front cost you pay doesn't translate to increased costs everywhere else, at least not to the same degree.

My library supports D3D11, Metal, Vulkan, and OpenGL, and Vulkan is the second-largest backend, but not by a lot (LOC: ~5k Vulkan, ~3.3k D3D11, ~2.5k Metal, 6k OpenGL). LOC is not the best indicator of complexity, to be fair. My OpenGL backend is definitely the most difficult to maintain and the largest, because the API is such a pain to deal with.

OpenGL was not stuck, either. OpenGL's AZDO project was alive & well: https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20... (just not on macOS because AZDO is GL4.2+ whereas macOS is stuck on 4.1)

Even then, having to implement that support infrastructure is time consuming if you have never supported that platform before. It is the first game that is the hardest. That is why publishers like Paradox and 2K can just throw almost every new release on Linux nowadays since they are all made on portable engines, are going to support OSX anyway, and they already have the support infrastructure for SteamOS and Ubuntu.

Its not even really an option, either. Since the games are commercial products in many (European) countries they have to by law support them in this way.

Yes I think there’s a good chance it’s compatible. Sorry for the slow response. Hope you get this.

Windows supports Vulkan but to get onto the Windows Store you can only use DX12.

Say what you want about D3D at least it follows a strict take or leave it regime.