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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I'll agree with you when they'll support Vulkan properly. Until then I see them as a hostile entity to common GPU APIs adoption.

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You're talking about macOS. We're talking about AGX2. If you want to complain about Apple's API support in macOS, a discussion about AGX2 support for Linux is not the right venue.

I am, quite honestly, getting very tired of all the off-topic gratuitous Apple bashing in articles about our Linux porting project.

Shmerl pops up on every thread mentioning Vulkan/Apple spouting conspiracy theory nonsense that every design decision is some kind of evil plan to screw over open standards. Ignore him.

Keep up the great work, plenty of people really appreciate it.

And keeps forgeting no one in the games industry, or console vendors for that matter, cares about his conspiracy theories.

Lock-in proponents bring their kool aid. Not impressed. Gaming industry is pretty messed up when it comes to lock-in. Everyone is paying this tax.

I am aware of my limitations as human being in this society, speak from actual work experience, and will use any tooling that I rant about when it is on the best interests of the customers, regardless of my personal agenda.

Something to think about, or maybe not.

Yup, I doubt he has experience working in the games industry. Many engines support multiple graphics APIs and there's often only 1-2 employees implementing/maintaining them so speaking about vendor lock-in is not a strong argument.

How is that a counter argument to anything? The need to support multiple APIs is not free. It's a tax on everything else.

You're right that it's not free. But compared to the whole game engine codebase size the renderer backend is usually not big.

It is a waste of time that could be avoided. And exists only becasue of insistence on lock-in by the likes of Apple.

Yes I agree it's tiresome, I wish hacker news had rules against people making bad faith arguments more so than they do now.

Why should they support vulkan? what does apple get out of that apart from less well optimised compute and shader code, using more battery and producing more heat for the same output. (the reason it would be less well optimised is Vulkan is an API designed by a group to be the best compromise of many GPU vendors.

If apple wanted to support vulkan without it being worse than Metal they would either need to add so many apple only extensions that it would be Vulkan in name only or make their GPUs be identical to AMD or Nvidia (unfortunately due to IP patents apple can't just make a copy of AMDs GPUs they need to find another IP partner and that is PowerVR).

If PowerVR had 80% of the GPU market (like Nvidia) the would have pushed Vulkan to line up with a TBDR pipeline but they do not so while you can run Vulkan on a TBDR pipeline you end up throwing away lots and lots of optimisations.

AGX (and SGX) aren't the only TBDR architecture. ARM Mali GPUs are also TBDR, are in plenty of phones, and run Vulkan just fine.

And Larrabee!!! It was the tilyest of them all!

Android developers wouldn't say phones run Vulkan just fine, unless when talking about Samsung and Google devices.

Hence why Google made it a compulsory API on Android 10, to try to tame OEMs in improving their Vulkan story, and yet it is a plain Vulkan 1.1.

Adding to this, that whole render pass concept in the Vulkan API was the TBDR vendors being very active contributors to the API. More explicitly describing the data flow there allows TBDR arch's to work on multiple parts of modern render graphs simultaneously and keep their tiles filled with work in places where the other synchronization methods wouldn't (or would require the kind of divination on the part of the driver that Vulkan is trying to avoid).

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