Vulkan is coming to macOS and iOS, but no thanks to Apple

No, not that Vulcan (note, that's spelled with a "c"). This one.

Vulkan-the open, cross-platform GPU API from the Khronos Group, the industry body that also develops OpenGL-is available on Windows, Linux, Android, the Nintendo Switch, and cloud systems, but it has one sizeable gap: none of Apple's platforms support it. macOS has old, and slow, OpenGL drivers, and iOS supports OpenGL ES, the OpenGL subset designed for embedded systems. Apple has thus far shown no interest in offering the modern Vulkan API and instead has pushed its own proprietary API, Metal.

Today, that gap is being substantially filled, with the open source, royalty-free release of MoltenVK-a runtime for macOS and iOS that offers an almost complete subset of the Vulkan API implemented using Metal. Released under the Apache 2 license, MoltenVK will enable developers to build their Vulkan applications for Apple's platforms, allowing for a single codebase to span Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and more.

Dota 2 using Vulkan-on-Metal, compared to Dota 2 on Apple's OpenGL drivers. (credit: Khronos Group)

Valve is an early adopter of MoltenVK. The company has been testing MoltenVK for the macOS version of Dota 2, and indications are extremely promising: the Vulkan-on-Metal version of the game has frame rates as much as 50 percent higher than the version using Apple's OpenGL stack. Apple's OpenGL drivers have long been criticized, both for their poor performance and for Apple's refusal to support the latest versions of the specification. The Dota 2 experience suggests that developers can reap big dividends by bypassing them.

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