Khronos Group Announces Free and Open-Source MoltenVK for macOS and iOS

[Raevenlord]

A Vulkan-compatible driver for macOS and iOS, MoltenVK, is now available free of charge and open-source. Having invested into its development for more than a year, Khronos Group has sponsored The Brenwill Workshop to donate MoltenVK for inclusion in the Vulkan graphics ecosystem.

We've also continued our efforts with LunarG who is today releasing a corresponding update to deliver macOS support to the Vulkan SDK. Also as a result of that work, Dota 2 will soon be updated to target Vulkan on macOS. It's been almost four years since we started contributing to Vulkan's goal of becoming a cross platform solution. With support for Windows, Linux, and Android crossed off the list, this latest set of updates checks off one of the largest remaining targets, giving developers an easy yet robust way to also target their Vulkan-based engines and titles to run on macOS and iOS. By making the code to MoltenVK freely available and open-source, the goal is to enable developers to bring their games to macOS and iOS with minimal development cost.





The LunarG Vulkan SDK is a key component for developers targeting Vulkan by providing tools such as validation layers, shader compilers, and a loader. Now available from LunarG [https://vulkan.lunarg.c om/], an updated Vulkan SDK now offers those same tools to developers targeting macOS, enabling them to efficiently develop Vulkan code on the platform.Additionally, we exercised MoltenVK with real world workloads including Dota 2 and we're seeing significant performance improvements over running on OpenGL. We encourage developers to test their engines and titles with MoltenVK and the LunarG SDK and provide feedback. We are committed to making Vulkan a viable option for developers targeting all platforms.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[bug]

Apple forbidding friver install in 3, 2, 1!

 

[R-T-B]

Apple forbidding friver install in 3, 2, 1!

Pretty sure Khronos group would've done their legal homework there.

 

[bug]

Pretty sure Khronos group would've done their legal homework there.

Who cares? Apple usually pulls out some "it doesn't integrate with the platform in the way we want" or "it degrades the user experience" when they do this.

 

[craigo]

I hope Apple fine tooth comb it, Allow it and enjoy the customers they gain by allowing it. This is great news for apple owners.

 

[Vya Domus]

Well , there goes any chance of Metal being relevant outside iOS. Quite ironic , since MoltenVK is built on Metal.

Apple isn't the only one with moronic restrictions when it comes down to graphics APIs , MS doesn't allow anything other than DirectX to be used in applications from their store. You would think that after dozens of years these companies would finally let go of these retarded measures that ultimately bite them back.

 

[Bansaku]

Wow, this is actually pretty big and exciting news! Now if only more developers would use Vulkan... but hey, it's a start!

 

[GoldenX]

Great news for the Apple and Hackintosh fans.

 

[efikkan]

I'm not too excited about this. Running a game engine on top of a translation layer like this will risk resulting in large numbers of bugs which are hard to detect, and probably would require a huge amount of workarounds to make it stable enough.

Hopefully this will pressure Apple to allow official support. If they don't, iOS will "struggle" in a couple of years.