Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes… and no.

Remember, to start, Windows only officially supports DirectX. OpenGL and Vulkan comes from your GPU vendor and Microsoft waives all responsibility for them. Vulkan is, quite literally, a 3rd-party API that can run on Windows - not something Windows supports or endorses.

Xbox does not support Vulkan. DirectX or get rejected.

Only 60% of Android devices support Vulkan. Guess you’ll also need ANGLE or OpenGL for backwards compatibility.

PlayStation does not support Vulkan. Better learn gnm, gnmx, and PSSL.

Nintendo Switch has Vulkan but it is almost unusably slow, on a console that is already not known for speed. Better use NVN if you want anything decent.

iOS does not support Vulkan. Better use Metal.

So… what does Vulkan support, exactly? Windows, Linux, and not enough of Android. If your game only runs on desktop, it’s a good option - but why not target DirectX? Windows, Linux with Proton, and most of the Xbox support all in one. For this reason, I have yet to see a Vulkan game that does not have a DirectX mode.

Blaming macOS for being proprietary is disingenuous in an industry full of Proprietary APIs.

You're doing a bit of slight of hand on Windows support.

Windows doesn't "support" the DirectX version shipped by your GPU vendor either. The drivers shipped by your GPU vendor, and all the APIs provided by them, are supported by your GPU vendor.

So the real thing we're talking about is hardware vendors. Nvidia and AMD support Vulkan, OpenGL, and DirectX where applicable. Apple only supports Metal. The console vendors have always had weird variant APIs based on the open standards but not identical, except MS where the console is very close to desktop Direct X.

On mobile hardware vendors ubiquitously support OpenGL ES and there's widespread support for Vulkan.

So it's complicated. In the desktop space, as a percentage of market share, Vulkan is extremely widely supported. Same with mobile. Consoles have always been an odd man out.

So Apple, which doesn't sell a console, is absolutely breaking from the pack in the markets they target.

> Same with mobile.

If you consider 60% of Android users, and 0% of iOS users, "widely supported," sure. That's less than half of mobile phones in use right now, making Vulkan the odd-one-out on mobile as well. You certainly can't build a mobile app right now that only uses Vulkan without cutting out huge parts of your audience.

> So Apple, which doesn't sell a console, is absolutely breaking from the pack in the markets they target.

Apple wants the same API on all of their devices, and I can't blame them. They are the odd-ones-out in Desktop only.

But does that really matter? If you are making a game only for Desktop, namely Windows, and weren't going to just use DirectX for some reason, it does (which I think, nowadays, is a rare situation). But if you are targeting any game consoles, or any mobile phones, you're adding multiple graphics APIs anyway and Metal is just another one.

> If you consider 60% of Android users, and 0% of iOS users, "widely supported," sure.

But that's what we're talking about, if it weren't for Apple Vulkan would be a near ubiquitous desktop and mobile API. Apple is the one standing in the way of that.

If Vulkan were a near ubiquitous mobile and desktop API, _maybe_ the console vendors would be more willing to tolerate it.

> if it weren't for Apple Vulkan would be a near ubiquitous desktop and mobile API

Ubiquitous desktop: Windows

Uniquitous gaming consoles: XBox and Playstation

Ubiquitous phones (worldwide): Android

APPLE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR VULKAN NOT BEING EVERYWHERE (not in Windows, not on XBox, not on Playstation, not on 40% of Android devices)

Microsoft can't be expected to just give up the gatekeeping that is DirectX on their own (well, maaaybe if antitrust was more effective ??).

Sony only cares about their console(s), so they prefer to focus on optimization rather than compatibility. (While Nintendo cares more about gameplay than graphics.)

Isn't that 40% of Android devices old / very cheap ?

Apple is one of the biggest (and especially, most profitable) companies in the world, and with great power comes...

So "Microsoft can't be expected", "Sony doesn't care" but we should only blame Apple. Gotcha.

Because only Apple has the power and hence the responsibility, not the tiny helpless companies Microsoft and Sony (~99% of consoles, 76% of desktop).

Edit: don't forget, Apple absolutely must support Vulkan (and others don't) because Metal is proprietary and non-cross-platform (just like any other graphics API on all major platforms) even though Vulkan appeared two years later than Metal (but neither Microsoft nor Sony are expected to drop their APIs which also appeared earlier than Vulkan).

Did I get that logic right?

If you're _really_ aiming for cross platform support, an RHI is only the beginning of your problems though. Replacing the rendering code may not be _trivial_ but if you're stuck at that point you're likely going to struggle with networking, filesystem, permissions, user accounts, store requirements. Modern rendering APIs are _similar enough_ in feature sets and abstraction layers that it's not an insurmountable task.

> Only 60% of Android devices support Vulkan

Total addressable market matters here. 100% of Android-based VR headsets support Vulkan. Granted, that's mostly the Quest 2, but it's not the only HMD in town anymore.

Also, a lot lot lot of Android devices are garbage-tier <$100 that you wouldn't want to target anyways because you won't get any sales on them. So the % of Android devices supporting Vulkan may be misleading in the sense that you might be aiming for a segment of devices with much, much higher, if not complete, support for Vulkan.

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