37 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Vulkan Portability Initiative: The Death of My GFX Abstractions?"
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date: 2021-09-12
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draft: false
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tags:
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- Prism
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- Vulkan
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- Metal
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aliases:
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- /articles/the-death-of-gfx/
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---
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In under an hour, I was able to port my already existing Vulkan code from [Prism](/projects/prism)
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to Metal using [MoltenVK](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK). <!--more--> Here's a screenshot (very exciting):
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To clarify, Prism running on macOS is nothing new. In fact, a large portion of the engine was
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developed natively on macOS using Metal. Vulkan was actually added after the fact, and since I already had plenty of
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Vulkan experience it was no trouble. I initially chose to use Metal natively (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](https://www.vulkan.org/portability)!
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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!
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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 endeavours 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_ :-)
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---
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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
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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~~
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---
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**Edit:** It turns out that I already hit a few snags with MoltenVK (which have [already been solved](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/pull/1539)) so the Metal backend is restored. My point still stands though, that the future for my enthusiast projects might be only Vulkan.
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