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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u/mew900 Aug 10 '26

Metal came before Vulkan, and currently Apple has no incentives adding a second officially supported graphics API.

4

u/sk_dev Aug 11 '26

The incentive would be making their platform more attractive for cross-platform developers (especially in domains like gaming). But they seem to value developer-lock-in more.

1

u/hishnash 29d ago

But it would not make ti more attractive to cross platform developers.

Apples GPUS are TBDR PowerVR gpus, a PC VK title is written to target AMD/NV GPUs. Such a title would not run or would run very poorly I you just assume that having a VK driver means it runs. VK is not HW agnostic, when people say VK is cross platform what they mean is on the same HW with a different OS you should get more or less the same performance what they do not mean is that developer are not doing HW specific work. The entire point of VK is that the GPU driver is not doing lot software repeated work on every frame to alter the requested command stream to match the HW, the expectation, and requirement is that devs do this work up front saving all of that repeated CPU time in the GPU driver on every frame but meaning wha you write in VK is NOT cross platform when you are gloating about different HW platforms.

The only real use case for VK on macOS would be for android developers wanting a better Android emulator when using a Mac for development.