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by skohan
2847 days ago
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To be fair, Metal is more than a "snowflake version of Vulkan". For one thing, it was in production before vulkan, largely to address the issue of OpenGL's overhead on mobile devices, and basically it achieves that goal. Also there are certain things which are exposed in Metal which are not in Vulkan, for instance more control over the tile memory which mobile GPUs use. So it's not as if there is no reason for Metal to exist (of course I would be happier if Apple contributed to Khronos to get those features in Vulkan instead). But the walled garden approach seems counterproductive here. In the days of Microsoft's dominance Apple made an effort to make windows formats usable on Apple because that meant it would be easier for consumers to switch to Apple without worrying about losing all their stuff from Windows. With regard to applications in which graphics API's are relevant (i.e. games) Apple still has a minuscule market-share, and it seems like they would be well served by adopting the dominant technology. Lock-in only works if you're already winning. |
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An advantage of all proprietary 3D APIs is the amount of out-of-box infrastructure code, debugging tools and having progressed beyond C, while Khronos APIs are still mostly C, and requiring creating mini-engine from scratch after fishing for libs.