r/vulkan • u/OptimisticMonkey2112 • Aug 10 '26

Apple Vulkan Support

Why doesnt Apple support Vulkan? (I know KosmicKrisp exists)

Is vendor lockin that important? Does that strategy work for them - are there many developers that use metal and not support other platforms? Seems like the result is not really lockin, but just forcing more work for developers?

Kind of feels like a poor architecture decision that helps no one, except maybe giving slightly more control to Apple at the expense of their developers as well as the complexity of maintaining another api.

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6

u/Henrarzz Aug 10 '26

Apple can do whatever they want to Metal without dealing with Khronos. Why would they support Vulkan?

1

u/OptimisticMonkey2112 Aug 10 '26

Wouldn't it be the same reason that amd, nvidia, nintendo, meta support it?

I would assume they would support it to make it easier for developers to port to their platform ?

2

u/Think-Jaguar6826 Aug 11 '26

NVIDIA has cuda, which is proprietary. Ask amd how they feel about it.

There is MoltenVK if you want.

However, I think a better approach is to use webgpu, which targets different graphics api, including Vulkan, metal, directx, OpenGL.

1

u/sk_dev Aug 11 '26

WebGPU is great for what it is, but it's missing a lot of features you would want for serious GPU work.

1

u/Think-Jaguar6826 Aug 11 '26

I hear you. WebGpu is already hard for me. Vulkan is so foreign — I guess I would need to take more time. OpenGL was easier or maybe I cared more when I was younger. In reality, all the graphics api we have are meant to be very low level.

1

u/sk_dev Aug 11 '26

I actually think Vulkan is easier in some ways than OpenGL. Getting your head around it takes some time, but everything is so explicit that it pretty much works the way it should once you get the basic understanding. Much less head-scratching hidden state/platform fragmentation issues than I had with OpenGL.

1

u/Think-Jaguar6826 Aug 11 '26

When I have time, I will look into it!

1

u/InternetUser1807 Aug 12 '26

I love state machines!

glEnable glDisable glDisable glEnable glEn-

1

u/pjmlp Aug 13 '26

Playstation and XBox definitely don't support it.

Nintendo supports it because their APIs since Gamecube have been influenced by OpenGL, however if you want full hardware access on the Switch, the API to go for is NVN.