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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

3D APIs are like GUI toolkits: Use the one supplied by the vendor. Metal on Apple, DirectX on Microsoft, whatever proprietary one comes with the game console(s) you're developing for.

If you're a gamedev, your engine should abstract all these away. If you're a gamedev, you should be using a commercial engine unless you have a John Carmack on staff.

OpenGL and Vulkan are the worst of all worlds and really only make sense on Linux or Android, which have nothing else.

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The vendors are the GPU manufacturers. And both AMD and Nvidia offer full support for OpenGL and Vulkan.

There is no reason why I should have to use a different APIs to access the exact same graphics hardware depending on whether I'm running Windows, Linux or MacOS.

OpenGL and Vulkan work just fine.

For various levels of just fine, and cranky tooling.

It only took 20 years to have RenderDoc catch up to PIX, and still nothing comparable to DirectXTK or MetalKit in sight.

And in regards to game consoles even worse.

> And both AMD and Nvidia offer full support for OpenGL and Vulkan

With big fat asterisks for the AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows :-P.

Just recently i read about someone trying Zinc (the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation) on AMD hardware under Windows is actually faster than AMD's own drivers (which is on line with what i've observed with my own code between AMD on Windows with AMD's drivers and AMD on Linux with Mesa with the latter being way faster than the former).

You should try out DXVK on Windows; it's usually as fast, if not faster.

I used it to bypass some issues with D3D9 games that AMD's newer drivers had (apparently it isn't OpenGL that takes the short stick anymore, it is just that OpenGL's stick happens to be the shortest :-P). I didn't notice any performance difference.

Regardless, i've switched back to Linux ever since i could run most of my games without needing Steam and Proton (wine-staging with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton - which works on regular Wine too - seems to work perfectly fine).

Gaming on Linux has been a complete joy. Some games do run worse (e.g. No Man's Sky takes a long time to procgen textures), but others run significantly better (10-15% uplift in AOE IV). If a game doesn't work on Linux then I simply don't play it.

My only gripe is VRR under Gnome. I might try Sway out again.

I like how you disparage OpenGL and promote John Carmack in the same breath. You do realize his opinions right? This is from 2020:

> OpenGL already has a patina of “old tech” like C, but it will almost certainly still be in active use for various things a decade from now. [0]

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/131388553587...

Quick shout-out to a graphics abstraction library that works quite well: sokol.

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It has DX11, Metal, and OpenGL backends (with optional shader compilation tool from GLSL to each target), which is probably all you need to get cross-platform support for all desktop and mobile targets. Rewrote my OpenGL code to this, was a pretty nice experience. The subset of graphical features it exposes seems more than good enough for simple 2D games (probably enough for simple 3D ones also). Can't say more than that though, since I haven't seen a shipped 3D game on Steam using it yet.

Though what we ultimately need for the future is a Metal-like API that runs on all platforms (since from what I've heard from other graphics developers Metal's API design is quite nice and finds the right balance between low-level control and high-level usability). The experimental SDL_gpu development (https://gist.github.com/icculus/f731224bef3906e4c5e8cbed6f98...) strives to achieve this, although it's still in the early stages...

WebGPU (wgpu in Rust land) is pretty fantastic as well.

Well… WebGPU is still in the early stages and seems a bit unstable as a target, so I wouldn’t start making an actual game with it right now.

Use Qt for tool GUI.

Write your own game engine, it's fun. Other programmers aren't God.

Use OpenGL ES or Vulkan. Windows, Android, and Linux are really the only platforms that matter.

On the desktop Linux matters very little.

For gaming, Mac matters even less

It matters enough that all major middleware engines support Metal.

GNU/Linux cannot even get ports from AAA games using Android NDK or Stadia, and has to emulate Windows instead, that is how much it matters.

iOS matters enough that the middleware engines support Metal

Might be, still here we have two UNIX based mobile platforms, with most game developers not caring one second about GNU/Linux.

OpenGL is supported by all middlewares and is native to Linux the way Metal is native to Mac. And Mac isn't getting ports of AAA games either.

If supporting Metal means Mac matters, then supporting OpenGL means Linux matters. If Linux having no ports means it doesn't matter, then Mac having no ports means Mac doesn't matter. Either opinion is defensible, but at least be consistent.

Many studios use Macs for the artists responsible to produce those AAA titles, Linux not even that unless we are talking about Hollywood studios that used SGI workstations and don't give a damm about what Linus thinks about NVidia.

You want consistency?

What about GNU/Linux not getting any of the OpenGL ES games from either Android or iOS from the last 10 years.

Artists now? You're moving the goalposts to outer space. What about the websites for those AAA titles that certainly run linux, which has 90%+ of the server market share?

It's clear now you're just here fanboying for your favorite company, so I'll end it here and leave you alone with your thoughts, the only place where the Mac is considered a gaming platform.

You're the one moving goal posts, artists are part of AAA game development the last time I checked.

Should I have explicitly mentioned game developers to make you happy?

We are talking about the desktop here, I am the first to admit defeat in UNIX having won the server room, at least until it doesn't get replaced by unikernels and serverless running in type 1 hypervisors.

My favorite companies for gaming are SEGA, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, see how you get it all wrong?

Enjoy Proton, don't let it crash too often.

For gaming, iOS matters more than Android.

iOS, yes. In mobile games market (which let's be honest, is considerably different segment from "desktop/laptop" gaming).

If M1 Macs didn't support running iOS games, remaining Mac ports of games would overlap heavily with games that also have Linux ports (especially after apple killed off all older 32bit Unity titles)

So, at this point, I'd consider mac gaming (not iOS) to start circling Stadia levels outside of Indie games that swallowed the pain of mac port, with things like Valve SteamDeck causing more interest in gaming on Linux than ever.

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