Vulkan 1.2 Arrives on macOS Vide MoltenVK
While we have the latest Vulkan 1.2 announced last week by Khronos as closer to metal open API standard for graphic which was initially revealed back in 2016, Apple has gone to the proprietary route of Using Metal API. This does not stop the open source enthusiast and macOS now has support for Vulkan using a translation layer called MoltenVK.
What’s New?
- Optimize descriptor management code to reduce memory footprint
- fix a cache leak,
- crash fixes
- bugs fixes
- Updated SPIRV-Cross for making various Metal MSL improvements.
What is MoltenVK?
From MoltenVK site “MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple’s Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS. With MoltenVK, you get the performance benefits and added debugging and performance tuning capabilities of the Metal framework on iOS and macOS, without having to rewrite your app that already uses Vulkan, the next-generation open-standard API for high performance GPU acceleration.
By building your application or game using the Vulkan API, you can run your modern graphics application or game unchanged across an entire industry of platforms and development tools.”
Thus essentially, MoltenVK lets you run Vulkan backend in macOS as it is not natively supported and makes Vulkan cross platform i.e. Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android etc. Best of all, MoltenVK is open source and anyone can contribute and see the source code.
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