Khronos Brings Vulkan to MacOS
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, 03-03-2018 at 08:06 AM (868 Views)
Apple loves to position itself as being on the cutting edge of OS research and development, but its long-term support for graphics APIs it didn’t develop in-house has been generally terrible. macOS is still limited to OpenGL 4.1, which was released in July, 2010. To put this in roughly approximate terms, imagine if Microsoft had quit evolving its graphics APIs with DirectX 11.0 and still expected everyone to rely on it for gaming and professional applications. Apple has launched its proprietary API for iOS and macOS, Metal, but it refused to support Vulkan, the open-source, low-overhead API intended to match DirectX 12 in the PC space. Fed up with this approach, the Khronos Group, which maintains Vulkan, has announced its own effort to bring Vulkan support to macOS and iOS whether Apple approves of it or not, via a thin translation layer.
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