Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware

I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking.

[1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years.

[2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.

Metal itself is the parallel stack, no?

Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry.

>I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing

The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.

> Metal itself is the parallel stack, no?

Ah perhaps I interpreted the quote in the wrong way then. At first it read to me as if Apple did their own bespoke compatibility work, but it's a comment about the mostly artificial Apple Silicon GPU / Metal stack that is only available on Apple devices.

Worth noting that Apple poured a lot of resources into making WebGPU happen. WebGPU is, in a great many ways, Metal but cross-platform. The way this pays off is if game developers start targeting WebGPU instead of Vulkan or DX12. That could happen since WebGPU is a meant to be a lot easier to code against than Vulkan. This effort to port DX12 can probably be seen as more of a hedge than anything else. They know that some publishers will stick to what they know for some time, but they wish for it to be easier to see the upside of a cross platform investment by publishers by delivering an easier win. If it doesn’t work perfectly but gets close, that still helps them a lot. Because Metal is no longer some parallel stack they’re promoting and wanting people to build Apple-exclusive games for, it’s a means to an end, and the end is WebGPU and cross-platform.

Game developers are not going to start mass adopting a JavaScript API.

WebGPU is not JavaScript only: https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/

Does it really work well for other use cases? Obviously you can call it, but typically a web API has many more security issues to handle than a native API, so I'd expect there to be a lot of compromises a game developer wouldn't want to deal with.

Yes. The non-JS interfaces are Dawn (C++) and wgpu (Rust). The Bevy game engine uses wgpu and I think many others will do the same. You can't really generalise from "typical web APIs" in the way that you have.

Wine/Proton is great. I still hit the "oh I need to set this env var" from time to time (mostly due to my Nvidia card). But, it's fantastic.

When you use Bottles to wrap it for ease of use/setup, you catch a glimpse of a future where no program is tied to Windows anymore.

Hope the same can happen with MacOS! And vice-versa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com