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| title | date | draft | tags | aliases | ||||
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| Vulkan Portability Initiative: The death of my GFX abstractions? | 2021-09-12 | false |
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In under an hour, I was able to port my already existing Vulkan code from Prism to Metal using MoltenVK. Here's a screenshot (very exciting):
To clarify, Prism running on macOS is nothing new. In fact, a large portion of the engine was developed on macOS using Metal. Vulkan was actually added after the fact, and since I already had plenty of Vulkan experience it was no trouble. I initially chose to use Metal (over MoltenVK at the time) because the tooling was still too new, and I wanted to learn Metal. However, something big has come along since then, the rise of the Vulkan Portability Initiative!
The biggest thing to come out of this is the introduction of first class macOS support. If you've used the Vulkan SDK before on macOS, you must give this new version a try. The new Vulkan SDK has an installer that takes cares of everything for you. Even the Vulkan Configurator works! This gets you the same exact experience like as if you were developing with Vulkan on Windows or Linux. Yes, even the Vulkan CMake module works out of the box, thank you to every developer who worked on this!
What does this mean for Prism? Not much yet except that it's awesome that it works pretty much of the box. However, for any future graphics endeavors for me, I unfortunately won't be supporting Metal anymore, there just isn't a reason to. I learned as much Metal as I wanted, and the Metal backend fulfilled that purpose. However, there's still a purpose to abstracting GFX away in Prism, to make way for DirectX support :-)
By the way, I would be interested to see if anyone develops a Vulkan Portable Subset -> WebGPU translation layer (maybe implementing it as a vulkan driver ala MoltenVK?) This would be amazing, but I have yet to find
anyone interested in doing this. I would be especially interested as I'm not interested in learning yet another API with its own quirks, and... WSL - ugh. Insert XKCD comic reference here
Edit: It turns out that I already hit a few snags with MoltenVK (which have already been solved) so the Metal backend is restored. My point still stands though, that the future for my enthusiast projects might be only Vulkan.