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Now that we can see Vulkan is around 4/3 more power efficient than Metal on the same hardware, I wonder if Apple will budge on their not-invented-here syndrome and allow for a real vulkan.kext on upcoming macOS versions. That would solidify it as not only the best graphical workstation OS, but also the best gaming OS, in my opinion. Part of me thinks they're avoiding this in worry of stepping on Microsoft's toes.

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They just won't do it.

Not that they can't, it would be nice. When they capitulated and came out with the intel macs around 2007ish, it became sort of a golden era. You could run macos and windows on their machines, and the smart computer folks started getting and usefully using macs.

But now apple is years into a disappointing inward looking phase.

What a decent future would be like...

  - vulcan/x
    - take back xquartz into the fold
    - actively pursue other linux graphics apis
  - apple does virtualization
    - maybe like rosetta but for all their software
    - run macos9 in a window
  - apple does containers
    - what if there was something like docker for macos natively?
      FROM macos:10.3
  - apple actively supports open source projects
  - open up ios
    - let me see the filesystem
    - let me run a firewall (true privacy?)

etc...

Not that I disagree with the spirit, X is dead, and someone demo'd Wayland apps on macOS at NixCon Paris.

The move to MacOS by development and sysadmin types started long before Intel Macs with the release of OSX, when it was finally possible to get a laptop with a 5+ hour battery life that ran a Unix-like OS.

Edit: The latest macOS has a great virtualization system built in, that many of the container platforms have already switched to.

The PowerPC machines never did reach actual 5 hour battery time, 3 at most, on a good day, with the display off.

I think my "Lombard" or maybe "Pismo" powerpc powerbook did longer than 3 by far. And my iBook would go 8 hours no sweat.

edit: fixed the nickname

Mine managed 6-8 without too much problem throughout the time I was in university. And they had removable batteries so you could just switch them out if you ever needed to (I had two for my Powerbook, and that would do a full day on campus without ever having to go near a power outlet).

G4 ibooks were crazy good for battery life, I often did a whole day of uni on my little white beast.

If you go work for apple and use development hardware, you can have many of these things...

But you lose the ability to talk about it.

If Apple did all that, I would buy new hardware from them, and even leave their OS in place on it, for the first time in almost two decades.

From the article:

* Please don’t take the exact number too seriously, as there are other differences too (Xonotic runs under Rosetta on macOS, but it was also rendering at a lower resolution there due to being a non-Retina app).

Not the least of which is likely power and clock state management (both on the CPU and GPU)

> Now that we can see Vulkan is around 4/3 more power efficient than Metal on the same hardware

Nonsense.

They haven’t even implemented power management and it’s not even a fair comparison.

About power management:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/11mjhx5/tips_fo...

Marcan (two weeks ago):

  It's a known issue blocked on bureaucracy/politics with the kernel, so you just have to wait. Sorry.

  ARM64 Linux does not want hardware-specific cpuidle drivers, instead relying on the PSCI firmware standard, but that standard is designed to rely on optional ARM features that Apple Silicon does not implement, so we can't implement it. Basically, PSCI assumes you have a "super-hypervisor" running the platform (TrustZone/EL3 on most Androids, but also somewhat similar to SMM mode on Intel), which is something Apple very deliberately stripped out of their CPUs very quickly because they don't need it and their security model relies on better solutions. Linux on AS truly runs on bare metal at the highest privilege, unlike the vast majority of other ARM64 platforms.

  The current thinking is we need to make a new standard, either a new PSCI transport that does work on AS or something simpler/ad-hoc. We haven't had time to start that long conversation formally yet. I could write a hardware-specific cpuidle driver in a day, but of course they'd reject it upstream.

Doesn't seem like this is going to be fixed anytime soon. :(

It's not using Vulkan. It's using opengl.

Native Vulkan support could also pave the way for a proper Mac version of DXVK. That could make Macs a lot more viable as gaming machines than they are now, even with the Rosetta 2 overhead.

As much as I like the idea of Linux being in a special position w/r/t emulation layers for Windows games, this makes a lot of sense to me as something that would be desirable to Valve, and might, like the Steam Deck, help bootstrap Proton+DXVK as a worthy target platform for game developers/publishers.

Valve supports Steam Deck/Proton that much because they are afraid of being killed by windows locking itself down, it's a live line for them, but not a supper profitable business.

A Steam for iOS & Android might be worth it for Valve, but for Mac it's like not worth the money it costs.

Additionally Apple is one of the main offenders pushing for a lockdown of PC platforms and one of the main lobbyist trying to prevent regulation requiring the possibility of (well working) 3rd party app stores. Which means not only would good Mac support be costly it also is constantly at risk of "defacto" being killed off. (Yes there are currently regulations for requiring 3rd party app stores, but it being theoretical possible and it being practically viable for a business are not the same.)

I'm not sure the original proposition was that Valve focus on making that happen:

> > I wonder if Apple will budge on their not-invented-here syndrome and allow for a real vulkan.kext on upcoming macOS versions

> Native Vulkan support could also pave the way for a proper Mac version of DXVK

I think the proposition was that if Valve lets it happen, other interested developers might be inclined to improve the situation enough that it's not so much extra work for Valve to add Mac support to Proton.

I'm not sure who all would be interested, but I imagine the motivation would be similar to whatever is keeping the MoltenVK developers going.

You're right that Apple provides an a hostile and precarious platform compared to Linux, of course.

> I wonder if Apple will budge on their not-invented-here syndrome and allow for a real vulkan

Do you realize that Vulkan as an idea (not even as a spec) appeared 1 year after Metal was shipped?

Do you realize that apart from Android there's no platform that truly supports Vulkan?

> That would solidify it as not only the best graphical workstation OS, but also the best gaming OS

Of course it wouldn't. Vulkan is on its way to become the next OpenGL

Vulkan is about 4/3 as power efficient when rendering at a lower resolution than Metal

Is that surprising? Fewer pixels usually means faster rendering.

Metal was rendering at lower resolution than Vulkan here.

OpenGL rather.

It’s not 4/3 as power efficient at all, that comment was based on a misreading of the stats given.

Metal was rendering in a lower resolution, but metal the game was also running through rosetta (x86 emulation) on Mac which is fast but has some overhead.

_Hence why she claims that it is in a similar performance range._

(instead of saying it's way fast, which is a result from taking sentences out of context and not fully reading the article)

Xonotic runs under Rosetta on macOS.

>Part of me thinks they're avoiding this in worry of stepping on Microsoft's toes.

What

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