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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

In Rust land, the Rend3/WGPU stack is able to target Vulkan and Metal, pretty much invisibly to the application. Also Android and WebGL, although not as seamlessly, because the threading model is different in those worlds. It's supposed to also support DirectX on Windows, but since Windows supports Vulkan, why bother? I have the same code running on Windows and Linux with no conditional compilation in my code.

The Bevy game engine reportedly runs happily on all those platforms.

In C++ land, Godot has similar portability. So do UE5 and Unity.

If it wasn't for Apple shooting themselves in the foot with Metal, we'd all be on Vulkan now, without these portability layers.

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I know everyone likes to hate on Apple for doing their own thing (and often rightfully so) but Metal predates Vulkan by 18 months. They needed to do it themselves because something like Vulkan/DX12 didn't exist to adapt and the alternative was OpenGL ES.

This is disingenuous.

AMD created Mantle, it was a good idea that they agreed to create it as an open standard and invited everyone in to participate in a unified standard. Halfway through Apple decided to do its own thing and created Metal.

Apple were clearly sabotaging a unified GPU platform by creating Metal.

Don’t keep saying Apple got there first because AMD did.

I call bullshit. Most games that aren’t on Apple platforms don’t target Vulkan but DX12 instead.

Plus you’d still have different graphics backends needed for the consoles.

I agree, whenever something claims to be "pretty much invisibly to the application", it means the abstraction is going to be too costly to build an AAA game that runs at 200 fps on modern hardware. There is a reason why DX12 is the framework of choice for 99.9% of the industry.

No RPi vulkan I believe for the embeddable world.

Right now, someone is trying to get my ui-mock cross platform test running on a Raspberry Pi. Current problem involves glib 2.0 not available on some version of LUbuntu.

Does Android not support standard Vulkan as well?

Android does support Vulkan. Although I don't think you can do graphics from outside the main thread, which is a major feature of Vulkan. A key idea in Vulkan is that the main thread is just doing refreshes, while other threads are changing what's in the GPU. This allows keeping the frame rate up even when the scene is changing.

(We've had a split on concurrency. Web devs think in terms of callbacks and async, but not real multiple threads running on multiple CPUs with explicit locking. Game devs doing high performance games think in terms of multiple CPUs and the GPU all working in parallel, pumping huge amounts of graphics content. WASM and Android follow the web model. There's kind of a hack involving multiple processes with some shared memory, but it's not general purpose threading.)

It would be interesting to see some data on how good the Vulkan support coverage is. And early Vulkan devices may have buggy or poorly performing drivers.

Apps usually go for the API that works on all devices.

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