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by liuliu 3421 days ago
Saying it is around the same time is to ignore the history.

Metal is available since Jun 2014. Vulkan announced on 2015 and the initial release is on 2016.
2 comments
fnord123 3421 days ago
You're right. And Vulkan is based on Mantle which was already available in 2013 (in drivers; with api docs available in 2015 for some reason[1]). Why Kronos/Valve/etc didn't use Metal as a starting point, I don't know.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9095/amd-mantle-api-programmin...

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vetinari 3421 days ago
Metal in 2014 is a different animal than Metal in 2016.

In 2014, it assumed that the GPU has unified memory architecture, for example (i.e. the GPU can access a memory buffer that you have a pointer to). That's why it was introduced on iOS only.

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