They should just support directx. Devs will never support two graphics api’s. it costs too much especially to grab the marginal mac os share that has powerful enough gpu’s. Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.
Not going to happen, what's more likely is a Proton-like layer above macOS APIs to simplify porting games over. Also see "Game Porting Toolkit" here: https://developer.apple.com/games/
I've no idea exactly how MS licenses uses of DX, but just for context Imagination Technologies just released a custom GPU design that implements DirectX Feature Level 11_0 (which corresponds to earlier versions of DX 12 [1]): https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-br...
Imagination Technologies is a near 40 year old British silicon IP company that has been doing GPUs for quite some time, just not ones supporting DX up until now, and it has nothing to do with MS (in terms of ownership / rights / etc).
The way that works isn't that IMG ships a full directx implementation, but that they ship some kernel and user mode components that plug in to Microsoft's directx implementation such that when taken together, directx is accelerated by IMG's hardware.
Similarly, Microsoft would need to release the non GPU specific bits for macos to fit the same model.
DirectX APIs can be emulated on top of other 3D APIs, see Proton on Linux for instance.
Of course the idea of Apple switching from Metal to D3D is rubbish, but a Proton-like solution for macOS totally makes sense (maybe the "Game Porting Toolkit" will be exactly that eventually).
I guess parent forgot "on macOS and iOS". Technically every game on macOS or iOS is running on Metal, because the Apple OpenGL implementations are also running on top of Metal for quite a while now ;)
Across platforms, there's no chance in hell that more games run on Metal than DirectX, not even when counting iOS shovelware.
There are also more games on Metal than DirectX. And when I say DirectX, I meant the latest versions of DirectX. No idea what the count is for all games released for DirectX total. It's not relevant for the topic I was replying to.
The OP said Apple should switch to DirectX. They can't because it's closed source. The reason given was that devs won't support 2 APIs. They already do. They support DirectX and Vulcan (PS5 version) almost always. And devs already support Metal - with more games than the latest DirectX.
Not going to happen, what's more likely is a Proton-like layer above macOS APIs to simplify porting games over. Also see "Game Porting Toolkit" here: https://developer.apple.com/games/