Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this was planned to use the PowerVR ray tracing solution. I believe Apple and Imagination Tech quietly buried the hatchet some time ago.

I also wonder how this will work for the Metal API. Metal currently does have support for accelerating ray tracing via acceleration structures and a few other things that require GPU hardware features not present on older GPUs that are not specific to ray tracing only. It doesn’t not have support for ray tracing specific hardware acceleration like in NVIDIA’s RTX and AMD’s RDNA2 chips. This means you can buy a 6000 series AMD GPU, stick it in an Intel Mac Pro, and not actually be able to use the RT acceleration hardware!

View on HN

Metal does have that support on the API side afaik.

Just that they didn't implement the raytracing support in the AMD driver side...

Metal raytraycing is a thing and it's the officially supported API. I think AMD just didn't bother to write the driver since their GPUs are present much viewed as legacy by Apple.

Metal API. I can not understand why they did not just go with Vulkan.

Metal predates Vulkan by almost 2 years.

It predates the name change from Mantle to Vulcan by almost two years. Metal was built using Mantles ideas. When AMD gave it to Khronos, they changed the name to Vulkan.

Here is a comment from 2016 from a person already tired of explaining this to people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11112078

Mantle beat Metal to the press release stage, but Metal shipped before Mantle did.

Mantle morphed into Vulcan even later than that.

That has no citations and is pretty ranty. Given the timing, it seems more likely that all of the people in the industry working on similar problems identified the same problems with the previous generation APIs and since they all work with the same major developers they're going to be coming up with similar solutions.

At the time, Apple was using AMD GPUs in their macbooks.

Also their desktops. My point was just that they’re similar but not the same and everything in that space was evolving in the same directions for the same reasons. If Apple was ripping it off I’d expect them to be more similar and further apart in time.

I’m sorry but you’re quite wrong that Mantle was a simple name change to Vulkan.

The mantle API was a foundation but what came out was quite different.

Much of the Mantle team also went on to work on DX12 and Metal as well, so they have as much lineage to Mantle as Vulkan does

The comment you link to also ignores all the context of the timing, including the significant amount of time between when Metal was released and mantle was donated to khronos, and how much khronos was pushing AZDO OpenGL at the time. The post you linked is quite biased and uninformed.

Better still, AMD was the GPU vendor for Macbooks at the time of Mantles release. Sounds like classic Apple to me.

That's still no reason to keep Metal alive and ignore Vulkan. It's a huge competitive disadvantage by now. Put Metal on live support, implement Vulkan and transition to sit on a Vulkan translation layer. Profit!

Because Vulkan didn’t exist when Apple developed Metal.

Anyway, MoltenVK is a thing.

Metal is missing enough features that wrapping from Vulkan will never be ideal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com