[ireallywantthat]

> Why would Apple support something that appeared two years later than Metal?

Because Vulkan is Open Standard? It's similar to how EV car manufacturers other than Tesla are now embracing NACS even though it was born at Tesla. It's also similar to how Apple adopted USB C given Lightning was already a standard before USB C.

You can't blame community or Khoronos either. Khoronos and developers did their best with best effort Vulkan-> Metal translator with Moltenvk and you can now not worry that your Vulkan apps won't run on MacOS(exceptions are heavy games and there are still many Vulkan extensions not implemented thanks to Metal).

And note that it's not you or I who is losing because Apple didn't support Vulkan. It's Apple themselves whose Mac devices have started losing share in Gaming Market. Day by day, Developers are ignoring MacOS as target. If this isn't a warning call to Apple, i don't know what is.

[troupo]

> Because Vulkan is Open Standard?

Why didn't Microsoft immediately embrace it? Or Sony? Or...

> You can't blame community or Khoronos either. Khoronos and developers did their best with best effort Vulkan-> Metal translator

Yes. Yes, we can and should blame Khronos. For their mismanagement of OpenGL. For the fact that they woke up and decided they needed a new API a full year after both DirectX and Metal, and managed to release first version a full two years after those two.

> And note that it's not you or I who is losing because Apple didn't support Vulkan. It's Apple themselves whose Mac devices have started losing share in Gaming Market.

Ah yes. They are losing because of not supporting Vulkan.

Let's see:

- iPhone is Metal (before you say that more people are gaming on Android, iOS's mobile gaming revenue dwarfs Android)

- Xbox is DirectX

- Playstation is GNM and GNMX

Apple is losing, should abandon Metal and go all in on Vulkan because.

[ireallywantthat]

> Why didn't Microsoft immediately embrace it? Or Sony? Or...

Because they are already established platforms in Gaming Industry? Windows has much of Gaming market share. Xbox and PlayStation are popular Consoles. They probably don't loose anything by supporting Vulkan although supporting Vulkan would be awesome on their part.

> Ah yes. They are losing because of not supporting Vulkan.Xbox is DirectX. Playstation is GNM and GNMX

I was only talking about MacOS.

> before you say that more people are gaming on Android, iOS's mobile gaming revenue dwarfs Android

I didn't talk about iPhone either. I was only talking about MacOS. despite being prominent OS, game title developers often ignore MacOS. Why? Because of Graphics API. No one bothers to target Metal for Games and this is exactly what i am talking about. If MacOS allows Vulkan or DX(ik that it's not possible), i think there could be more influx of games.

If we are talking about Gaming on iPhone, you must know that gaming landscape on mobile phones is vastly different than that of mainstream gaming experience on Consoles/PC. Mobile gaming landscape is mostly filled with non graphics intensive, micro transactions filled, Ad-filled(many times freewares) games. iPhone gets targeted because it has prominent share in Mobile Market but even then, not everything gets ported to it. Not to mention, Android gaming landscape doesn't suck than iphone. Prominent Mobile games which are on iPhone are on Android too and on Android they use Vulkan which proves that Vulkan is not a bad choice.

> Xbox is DirectX. Playstation is GNM and GNMX

Vulkan probably runs on PlayStation (see latest Baldur's Gate 3 patch notes; grep for PS5 Vulkan) but I am not so sure. Like i said earlier, these platforms are already household names when it comes to gaming.

My point was not to tell you that Vulkan is the "supreme" Graphics APIs out there. But my point was to tell you that Vulkan is the only one of "supreme" APIs which is most cross platform, modern, supported by gaming and graphics forerunners(valve, rockstar, nintendo) and there are no viable alternative to Vulkan right now.

> Yes, we can and should blame Khronos. For their mismanagement of OpenGL

What should they have done? At the point, we needed modern Graphics API. Mantle by AMD was forerunner and AMD was willing to co-operate. Nvidia too joined that bandwagon. Thus, Vulkan was born out of Mantle.

Should they have copied Metal? Since it was closed API from Apple, it wasn't possible. Should they have copied Microsoft's DX12? If Microsoft actually loved Open Source and Standards and gifted Khronos DX12, it would have been possible but they didn't do it. I think Khronos did sensible thing at that time.

[troupo]

So:

- you're willingly ignoring other platforms that Apple has and that are more important to Apple than Mac

- you're willingly ignoring the fact that Apple never care d about gaming on Macs

- you're pretending that gaming success is predicated on supporting Vulkan even though huge gaming platforms never supported Vulkan, and are successful

But sure. Apple absolutely must support Vulkan on Macs because they are losing out or something.

> But my point was to tell you that Vulkan is the only one of "supreme" APIs which is most cross platform, modern, supported by gaming and graphics forerunners(valve, rockstar, nintendo)

1. As if Apple (or anyone really, see Microsoft and Sony) cared about it being crossplatform and modern

2. There are thousands of game developers, and a very small number of those "forerunners" care about Vulkan.

> What should [Khronos] have done?

Not sit on their asses until it was two late. Both DirectX 12 and Metal were released in 2014. It means that Apple and Microsoft had been working on these new APIs since at least 2012.

Khronos woke up and decided to create a new API in 2015.

It's amazing you're blaming Apple and Microsoft for not doing something for Khronos out of the goodness of their hearts when the "amazing open innovative forerunners" like NVidia, AMD, Valve, Epic etc. are their members and literally did nothing until, well, it was too late.