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by ChuckMcM 3419 days ago
Not trying to be uncharitable here, I'm just sharing how it looks to someone driving by.

That doc says:

"It[WebGL] was based on OpenGL ES, a cross-platform API for graphics targeted at embedded systems. This was the right starting place, because it made it possible to implement the same API in all browsers easily, especially since most browser engines were running on systems that had support for OpenGL."

And then it says later this:

"The major platform technologies in this space are Direct3D 12 from Microsoft, Metal from Apple, and Vulkan from the Khronos Group. While these technologies have similar design concepts, unfortunately none are available across all platforms."

And one imagines you could put up a big chart and have all the platforms as the columns and each technology as the row, and show all of the gaps. But the consensus is that Vulkan would show up on all the platforms except Apple's. So one might ask "well if you put Vulkan on your platforms, then you would be back to the WebGL situation where you had stuff that ran on all platforms and you could work on a Web API to that code.

So "optically" which is to say, to a casual observer, it seems like Apple is saying everyone put this new thing on your platform as this web api we're working on will talk to it.

I understand that you just want the best experience possible given the advances that have been made in GPUs over the last decade.

1 comments

But isn't the Vulcan situation on windows similar to the OpenGL one? You need to install drivers...

In which case won't browser makers target directx anyway, as they have with webgl?

Why would Microsoft behave any differently to this new API when they have not officially supported previous open attempts?

Adding another standard to the mix just seems to be compounding the problem to me.