[HN Gopher] Stadia Is a Major Driver of Vulkan Adoption
___________________________________________________________________
Stadia Is a Major Driver of Vulkan Adoption
Author : fulafel
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-10-01 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stadiadosage.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stadiadosage.com)
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| I would say that the major drivers was
|
| AMD pushing Vulkan while their GPU are powering both the Xbox and
| the PlayStation.
|
| ID Software adding Vulkan support to DooM (2016), resulting in a
| >30% FPS boost.
| izacus wrote:
| Neither of those consoles use Vulkan as their API and the AMD
| GPU there is pretty much just an implementation detail.
|
| Is this the same disinformation as people claiming that PS3
| used OpenGL?
| [deleted]
| okpx wrote:
| Will people refund their Stadia controllers?
| lake_vincent wrote:
| _was_ a major driver...
| smt88 wrote:
| The service will be around for a while, and Google plans to
| sell it to other companies interested in streaming games. One
| could imagine Nintendo pushing into streaming to compensate for
| the weak Switch hardware.
| thejammahimself wrote:
| I think Nintendo already did something similar with games
| like AC Odyssey (and probably others) though they never did
| it in the western market to my recollection. However it might
| be another company that operates the servers.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It's another company that operates the services and "ports"
| games over. There is now several "Cloud" games available in
| western markets for the Switch like the Kingdom Hearts
| Collection, Guardians of the Galaxy and Hitman.
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| More than Steam / Proton / Steam Deck?
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Proton uses DXVK to translate DirectX calls to Vulkan. I don't
| know if that counts as adoption, but its still the resultant
| API of Windows games running in Proton.
| ribit wrote:
| I would almost view Proton as a risk factor for Vulkan as it
| discourages the devs to use cross-platform approaches. Much
| easier to write only for Windows and let Proton folks to figure
| out the compatibility problems. This also results in Vulkan
| losing initiative and being forced to closely follow DX. I'm a
| bit worried that the way things are Vulkan is going to become
| "that API libraries use to emulate DX12 on Linux"...
| cma wrote:
| Vulkan works on Windows too though, so you can still write
| for Windows only, get support for both platforms through
| proton, and use Vulkan.
|
| And as a bonus you then work on Android if you do a bit of
| porting work later on, which can now support desktop shading
| models with Vulkan, while with a sufficiently old Direct X it
| may only let you more easily target Windows Phone...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, why bother when they emulate Windows APIs.
| awill wrote:
| Proton isn't perfect, and works much better on Windows Vulkan
| games vs Windows DirectX. So even windows developers are
| choosing vulkan just to ensure better compatibility.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Numbers? Still looking forward how long it will stay
| relevant, specially with everyone and their dog releasing
| portable PC and Android handhelds.
|
| LG and Asus are arriving this year.
|
| Then there is the whole Geoforce Now and XBox Cloud, where
| those DirectX games can be streamed everywhere.
| hedora wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-
| Softw...
|
| (Edit: GeForce Now apparently runs fewer of my steam
| games than Linux. Certain games detect and block it. Same
| with android, but for different reasons.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Where does it assert AAA game studios are replacing
| DirectX with Vulkan?
| BuckRogers wrote:
| Your posts have always been so clear minded, and well-
| informed. If there were a way to follow a user on HN, you
| would be one of the few if not the only person on that
| list for me. Every post I see from you, it's clear you're
| informed on the market, you know how everything works,
| and you are very rarely wrong. I just wanted to say that
| in my opinion having used HN for many years, you're in
| the top 1% of users for contributions. I think you would
| be successful as some sort of IT and business analyst. Or
| maybe a blog or YouTube channel commenting on industry
| events.
| hedora wrote:
| Unless something drastic changed since Windows 8, Proton
| DirectX also works better than Windows DirectX.
|
| (At least on my collection of games ranging from the
| mid-1990's to 2022.)
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Nothing changed. I'm not much of a gamer, yet I have
| encountered a couple of Windows games that don't run on
| modern Windows very well but can be played flawlessly
| under Wine myself.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I've been running into this since the 00s.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Usually caused by clever programming tricks using
| undocumented APIs.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| This is from July 2022.
|
| Now that Stadia is shutting down [1], does that mean anything bad
| for Vulkan, I'm curious?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with the space, but from what I know,
| I'd say it would have almost no impact. The industry seems to
| have been moving towards Vulkan for a while now. Stadia may
| indeed have accelerated it, but the shutdown isn't going to
| halt its progress. (IMO)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Other than Linux, specially Android, very few game developers
| would bother with Vulkan per se.
|
| PlayStation and XBox were never found of Khronos APIs (other
| than GL ES 1.0 + Cg on the PS 1).
|
| Nintendo had a GL subset on the Wii, and while Switch
| supports GL 4.6 and Vulkan, those that want full control need
| to use NVN.
|
| Apple is going with Metal.
|
| And if one intents to use Vulkan abstraction layers as a kind
| of pseudo middleware, they are better of using classical
| middleware anyway.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Is there an industry advantage to divesting from OpenGL and
| splitting into a device specific APIs with hugely
| overlapping features, yet I'm sure, an impedance mismatch?
| Since most devs are targeting Unity or some other batteries
| included game engine, does it just not matter anymore?
| morelisp wrote:
| The total impedance matches of all device specific
| platforms you might target is often less than the
| impedance mismatch of just OpenGL vs. the real world.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It never mattered outside FOSS circles, in the 8 and 16
| bit days every platform was a special snowflake, so the
| industry grew porting contractors, platform specialized
| studios and middleware.
|
| If you dive into something like Ogre3D, you will see that
| actual 3D rendering API is a tiny slice of the whole
| cake, let alone in something like Unreal.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| No game developer is using raw Vulkan, Metal or DX12. these
| APIs aren't the same level of abstraction as OpenGL...
|
| Vulkan is AMD's Mantle open-sourced, it's far too low level
| for devs to waste time with, it's a target for game engines
| and renderers.
| dagmx wrote:
| I think both your sentences are incorrect.
|
| Tons of AAA game developers make their own engine and
| therefore work directly with the APIs while making an
| abstraction layer for their higher level game developers.
|
| Vulkan is also not just Mantle open sourced. It's a
| significant deviation from the original Mantle API.
| Mantle was a starting point but what emerged as Vulkan
| was quite different.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > Tons of AAA game developers make their own engine
|
| Recently a bunch switched to Unreal. Are there THAT many
| that still maintain their own? Seems like it's just big
| studios and less than a dozen. Even a massive company
| like Square Enix is now using Unreal for many projects.
| dagmx wrote:
| Almost all Sony first party studios use custom engines,
| even when they support PC. Most Nintendo first party
| games are custom engines. The majority of Microsoft first
| party games are custom engines.
|
| Ubisoft use custom engines, EA use custom engines.
|
| Call of Duty is a custom engine (derived from idTech)
|
| If you go to the GDC YouTube channel (
| https://youtube.com/c/Gdconf ) you can see the range of
| game specific things that these studios are working on
| that using an off the shelf engine is limiting
|
| I also recommend looking at the presentations on
| http://advances.realtimerendering.com/
| sk0g wrote:
| Ubisoft have about 5 engines themselves. When Microsoft
| acquires Acti-Blizz, they'll have close to a dozen
| engines under their umbrella as is, I think.
|
| UE being picked up by a AAA studio is news, because
| gamers associate UE with extreme fidelity graphics. A
| studio using a proprietary engine is boring because it
| won't matter one bit for 99% of people, and is modus
| operandi, basically.
|
| Edit: remembered SteamDB has a rough breakdown based on
| manual rules, so a lot of engines aren't picked up, but
| it's still interesting - https://steamdb.info/tech/
|
| Proprietary engines tend to be more common on consoles I
| think - Steam has a lower barrier to entry overall, so it
| doesn't filter out the smaller projects as much (which
| are more likely to use an off-the-shelf engine).
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Not just AAA. It's certainly a minority, but custom
| engines aren't _that_ uncommon even among indies. The
| last game I finished was Return to Monkey Island released
| two weeks ago, built on a custom engine with custom
| Vulkan and DirectX 12 renderers (and I guess the macOS
| version probably uses Metal).
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| I'm curious why they went full-on Vulkan/DX12 instead of
| just DX11. It's an adventure 2D game, the performance
| requirements aren't that high, and DX11 still has the
| most stable and performant drivers out of all the APIs.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| Possibly their next game is less refined so they learned
| the dev stack on something that was less up for debate.
| Now the know the dev stack to focus on content.
| dagmx wrote:
| The industry has most definitely not moved towards Vulkan.
| It's still quite a small player in terms of market share of
| games.
|
| Most windows games still target DirectX or OpenGL instead of
| Vulkan.
|
| With how well Proton runs, there's even less incentive for
| game devs to directly target Vulkan now.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| In terms of market share sure, though the
| Vulkan/Metal/whatever approach is clearly the future, no?
| AFAIK that isn't in question, it's just a matter of how
| long it will take for mass adoption.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yea going towards low overhead APIs like Metal, Vulkan
| and DX12 are definitely the way. DX12 has a very
| significant market share lead and is what most game devs
| on PC would target. Vulkan being a distant second and
| Metal being an even more distant third.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Vulkan is only really relevant if you also want to publish
| your game on Linux or Android (targeting Linux is not as
| laughable as it was a couple of years ago because of Steam
| Deck - of course there's also Proton, so a native Linux port
| isn't even needed in most cases).
|
| Game consoles don't use Vulkan, Windows is better served with
| DX12 if you also publish on Xbox, macOS has Metal but macOS
| is also a fairly tiny market. All in all, Vulkan doesn't
| actually matter all that much outside of Linux and Android.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| X-Plane notaby put in a major effort to move the entire
| pipeline to Vulkan.
|
| And that platform is used in professional aerospace.
| xani_ wrote:
| Steam Deck does.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| > Game consoles don't use Vulkan
|
| The Switch does.
|
| Windows may be better served with D3D12, but Vulkan is fine
| for almost all cases. If you choose Vulkan rather than
| D3D12 you also get Android, Switch, Steam Deck/Linux and if
| you aren't too bothered about performance, iOS/macOS via
| the MoltenVK translation layer.
|
| PC+Mobile is a pretty massive chunk of the gaming market to
| get with just one graphics backend.
| tomComb wrote:
| How can it not be bad for Vulkan?
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Am I missing something here, or is there a huge gap in the
| author's logic?
|
| As I understand it, the argument is like this:
|
| * 407 games run Vulkan
|
| * 270 of those games also support Stadia
|
| * Therefore, direct quote here, "the entire gaming industry is
| better off because of Stadia and their partners paving the way
| here"
|
| It's hard for me to believe that a writer who, to quote his own
| bio, "is an HPC professional with a PhD in Physics from the
| University of California, Berkeley" would make an argument that
| correlation implies causation. On the other hand, I've looked
| over this article a couple of times and that seems to be all the
| argument there is.
|
| Considering how many tenuously related keywords the author
| stuffed into the article, I think a likely explanation is that
| this blog commissioned the article as SEO bait; a writer who
| doesn't know correlation from causation from their elbow and
| isn't being paid enough to find out wrote the article,
| concentrating mainly on keyword stuffing; the editor, who would
| have known better than to make this argument, posted the article
| after only the most cursory of readings, enough to satisfy
| himself that there were no blatant misspellings or racial slurs.
|
| It's not an interpretation that's flattering to the putative
| author, but on the other hand, it also wouldn't be flattering to
| think of him as a scientist with such a poor grasp of logic.
|
| Moot point anyway, I suppose, since though we might argue about
| how much Vulkan adoption Stadia was driving, I think we can all
| agree on how much more it will drive.
| intelVISA wrote:
| A classic case of credentials over competence I think
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Eh, last I checked (and I admit it's been a while) a UCB
| degree still means something in the hard sciences. It's a
| school you might be able to fake your way through for a
| little while, but not for the six years or so that undergrad
| followed by a PhD program would take.
| mattnewport wrote:
| It seems to be a Stadia fan site so the reason for this article
| existing is that they need to keep a steady stream of Stadia
| news and puff pieces. They're just trying to come up with
| positive things to say about Stadia, not trying to actually
| come up with true insights about the broader industry.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I see it the same way. My point is just that this one
| particular puff piece contained an error, and that the nature
| of this error and the background of the (putative) author
| make it seem unlikely that he could have made that error. So
| it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that the
| "author" had this ghostwritten, and didn't read it over as
| carefully as he might have before posting it.
| phaedryx wrote:
| I don't know if I agree with the conclusion. Are people choosing
| Vulkan because of Stadia, or because they want to deploy to the
| other platforms and Stadia is a nice bonus?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, he argues for causation using a correlation as evidence.
| I'm not an industry expert, but I sure never got the sense that
| developers relied on a Stadia release, or made it a main
| priority. He may be right, I just don't buy the argument in
| this article on its face.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You don't have to assume companies rely on stadia primarily
| to argue stadia is responsible for adoption. You just have to
| argue stadia brings more to table then it costs to target
| Vulkan. Which is orders of magnitude easier.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Granted, but the linked article doesn't do that either.
| Someone wrote:
| Possibly neither. We're missing data on games not using Vulkan.
| As an simple example, let's say it turns out that
|
| - out of 407 games running Vulkan natively, 270 run on Stadia
| (from the article)
|
| - out of 407 games not running Vulkan natively, also 270 run on
| Stadia (numbers the article doesn't mention that I made up to
| make a point)
|
| Then, the two "runs Vulkan natively" and "runs on Stadia" are
| 100% independent.
| jchw wrote:
| As far as I know, they're _definitely_ not independent,
| because Stadia only runs Vulkan natively. That 's kind of the
| point.
| p_l wrote:
| Some games use Vulkan only on Stadia, for example Cyberpunk
| 2077 -- the Linux+Vulkan build was reportedly one of the most
| stable at release day, but was available only on Stadia and
| only because of Stadia, as main development target was
| Windows with DirectX then ported over to consoles.
| dagmx wrote:
| Should be easy to verify against growth of Vulkan in the same
| timeframe as stadia vs the growth of Linux in the same time
| frame.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I think the biggest driver of Vulkan adoption is the fact that
| since all the graphics APIs are so low level nowadays, everyone
| is writing abstraction layers. Plus, Vulkan is a hedge against
| all the proprietary APIs. Also, 2/3 major consoles are on AMD,
| Vulkan was originally AMD Mantle, gonna guess there's some common
| tools and functionality...
|
| Anyhow, Vulkan will survive for the same reason as Linux; no one
| truly trusts MS, Apple, Sony, etc...
| Telemoto wrote:
| The normal game developer is quite happy with DirectX if they
| do not use an engine.
|
| Engine is a totally different topic as they do have experts to
| just support both in parallel.
|
| And when you look how DirectX is the default for tons of games
| on windows you wouldn't say what you said.
|
| The DirectX sdk and documentation is also really good.
| miohtama wrote:
| Are there any benchmarks if any engine (Unity, Unreal?) is
| faster on Vulkan?
| smoldesu wrote:
| There's a lot more nuance to the situation than that...
| different GPUs will have different performance footprints
| on Vulkan, and the actual ways these engines use Vulkan can
| differ greatly.
|
| _Generally_ , Vulkan yields better performance than
| directly-equivalent DirectX code. Even since the early days
| of commercial Vulkan use (2016), the performance uplift has
| been a notable upside. However, Vulkan code is generally
| more difficult to write than DirectX (or even OpenGL and
| Metal, AFAIK), which is part of the price you pay for
| portability. High-level libraries were expected to paste
| over these issues, but this infrastructure is still in it's
| infancy. Ironically, one of the best uses for Vulkan right
| now is acting as a sort of intermediate representation for
| DirectX/Metal API calls.
| ribit wrote:
| Just a minor nitpick: Vulkan might have Mantle DNA but it
| severely limited some of the original functionality (no
| pointers in resource binding). Funnily enough the closest API
| that matches what Mantle could do is Apples Metal.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only one console supports Vulkan, the Switch.
|
| Somehow there is this urban myth about Sony caring about
| Khronos APIs, when they only did such a thing with the
| Playstation 1, using GL ES 1.0 + Cg as alternative to their own
| API, as the adoption was very low, they eventually dropped it.
|
| Even on the Switch, if you want all the low level features, you
| are better served using NVN.
| capableweb wrote:
| Steam Deck also supports Vulkan, asks developers to add
| Vulkan support if it isn't already added, and if it isn't
| enabled, will try to automatically shim it:
|
| > Vulkan API: We recommend targeting Vulkan as your primary
| graphics API for best performance and battery life. If you
| use an engine like Unity or Unreal, enabling Vulkan in your
| build for all users will result in the highest
| performance/longevity. (Note: Proton includes a DirectX-to-
| Vulkan translation layer. If your game or engine has high-
| quality DirectX support but no Vulkan support, it's likely
| that this automated translation layer will exceed the
| performance of doing a custom Vulkan implementation.)
|
| https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/recommendations
| pjmlp wrote:
| Why should I ask such a thing?
|
| Programming with Vulkan is like asking everyone to be a
| device driver developer and a GPU hardware engineer.
|
| The recent webinar on profiles felt like a joke, manually
| jungling JSON files to generate bindings for specific
| profiles, meanwhile on proprietary 3D APIs that is a simple
| set of API calls.
|
| Khronos still doesn't get what is a productive SDK
| development experience.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > Programming with Vulkan is like asking everyone to be a
| device driver developer and a GPU hardware engineer.
|
| Yes, that's the point. To use a programming language
| analogy, OpenGL is C++ and Vulkan is LLVM.
| tpxl wrote:
| You don't need to program Vulkan, just whoever writes
| your engine. If you need to write your own engine it's
| fine if you don't use Vulkan, but Unreal Engine and Unity
| have supported Vulkan for a long time.
| spatulon wrote:
| s/Playstation 1/Playstation 3/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, should have looked into my own
| comments for that.
|
| By the way here is one of the public sources on the matter,
|
| http://sandstormgames.ca/blog/tag/libgcm/
| duskwuff wrote:
| > they only did such a thing with the Playstation 1, using GL
| ES 1.0 + Cg as alternative to their own API
|
| That doesn't add up. The PlayStation came out in 1994, and
| was followed up by the Playstation 2 in 2000. OpenGL ES 1.0
| wasn't released until 2003.
| dagmx wrote:
| Again, your understanding of how Mantle evolved into Vulkan is
| incorrect as is your understanding of which consoles support
| Vulkan and how much the graphics APIs for both those consoles
| differ from Vulkan.
|
| Consoles are far from a driving factor for Vulkan other than
| the need for these engines to abstract anyway.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I'm surprised more PC/Console AAA games aren't being
| written/ported for iPads and M1 Mac's since they have really good
| CPUs, GPUs and fast storage. Why is that? Is it because of
| Apple's insistence on Metal?
|
| The mobile games market has exploded hugely, there's definitely a
| big market there.
| wilde wrote:
| Combo of Apple's insistence on Metal and biz model mismatch.
| You can either make gambling for children or have apple throw
| pity money at you. No one is buying $70 apps.
| notatoad wrote:
| i think it's probably because the people who tend to play AAA
| PC or Console games already have a PC or console. Could
| developers really make more money, or would it just be people
| who already bought the game for PC on steam downloading an
| additional version for free?
|
| the mobile game market has exploded, but AAA games are a
| different dynamic and a different audience to the casual games
| popular in the mobile market.
|
| and for iPad specifically, apple's 30% cut probably factors
| into the decision in a big way.
| vageli wrote:
| > i think it's probably because the people who tend to play
| AAA PC or Console games already have a PC or console. Could
| developers really make more money, or would it just be people
| who already bought the game for PC on steam downloading an
| additional version for free?
|
| Which services give you the game on any platform? In my
| experience, you have to buy the game on each platform (and
| for some games, I have purchased them on multiple platforms
| because they were that good).
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Which services give you the game on any platform?
|
| The Microsoft Store generally will, ironically. Buying a
| game on Xbox will often net you the PC version as well (so
| long as you get it from the Microsoft Store). I think Sony
| tried a similar thing with the Vita a while ago, but I'm
| presuming that was a failure.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Steam? I guess you could say Steam is the platform but in
| the past Mac was a seperate platform and except for a
| handful of exceptions like Blizzard games usually required
| a seperate purchase. These days buying on Steam gets you
| the Windows/Mac/Linux versions if available. GOG is similar
| too. But buying off the Mac app store just gets you the Mac
| version (why does anyone buy off there ever?).
|
| Sony has also done some crossbuy stuff in the past. Their
| PS1 classics used to be generally PS3/PSP/Vita compatible
| and some titles were cross PS3/Vita/PS4 like Spelunky or
| PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale. Microsoft has done
| some cross Xbox/PC stuff too although you have to buy from
| their store.
| izacus wrote:
| How many games on AppStore can you see costing 69.99$ and how
| many people would pay that?
|
| The only mobile platform with any adoption is Switch where the
| audience is used to paying much more for games than on
| PC/Consoles (equivalent games tend to be even up to twice the
| price there after awhile).
|
| The other, potential mobile competitor, is Steam Deck which
| shares prices and game library with its desktop counterpart.
| filoleg wrote:
| The game studio making Resident Evil series has announced just
| a week or two ago during their big presentation a native M1
| port of Resident Evil VIII (the most recent one), among many
| other things. And not only that, they actually talked about it
| quite a bit in detail, and even showed some actual footage.
|
| Overall I agree with you though, this is literally just a
| single datapoint, and I cannot think of another one. But that
| seems like a solid start, especially since it is a legitimate
| AAA game, and they are doing it a year after the (very
| successful sales-wise) release. So they clearly are doing it
| for reasons other than just boosting up the initial sales by
| promising the moon. Looks like they genuinely believe they
| might make enough money with that M1 port.
| smoldesu wrote:
| We saw the same thing happen with Eidos and Tomb Raider, but
| that didn't exactly usher in a new era of MacOS gaming. Time
| will tell how successful Macs are for gaming, but I don't
| think the critical issue (the limitations of the software
| layer) has been fixed.
| MBCook wrote:
| Gaming on iOS is practically dead. No one wants to pay
| anything, so about all that gets made is freemium junk full of
| ads and IAPs. The glory days of amazing iPhone games is gone.
|
| Apple Arcade is helping, but it's never going to turn the tide.
| It's a last bastion with a few games.
|
| Port a recent game, sell it for $10, watch nothing happen.
| There are a few great ports out there (I just replayed SotN)
| but I doubt they make their cost back.
|
| Consumable IAPs ruined everything.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| Why is that ? I though people on iOS spend a lot more on apps
| than on Android ?
| bhaak wrote:
| Games are not apps. At least not for your average user.
|
| And then you still can only charge a single digit (or at
| most a low 2 digits) amount of dollars.
|
| There's no way you can charge as much as AAA titles with
| iOS games.
| MBCook wrote:
| Don't be so sure. Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, and many
| others have thought in tons of money.
|
| More than AAA? I'm not sure.
|
| But Candy Crush didn't cost what Horizon Zero Dawn or God
| of War did either. Not even close. And the game prints
| money year after year in a way most AAA games don't.
|
| Unless they IAPs too like GTA Online.
| bhaak wrote:
| That's the 1% of the 1%. There is only a handful of games
| that earn even remotely that much.
| connicpu wrote:
| It's generally through IAPs in freemium games, people have
| just become far more resistant to pay-up-front apps. I
| think a large part is not allowing you to try before you
| buy, people are afraid of getting burned. Even though
| freemium games are often horrible after a while of playing
| (unless you're willing to dump hundreds of dollars into
| them), the initial experience usually feels pretty fun and
| you feel good that you got it without having to spend any
| money to get to that point.
| dagmx wrote:
| > Gaming on iOS is practically dead
|
| Uh no it isn't. People who make that claim only think about
| AAA titles and high profile indies.
|
| If you consider the entire gaming landscape, Apple earns more
| from gaming than most companies that actually operate in the
| gaming space.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/05/31/apple-earner-
| the-...
| MBCook wrote:
| They earn a metric ton from IAPs, which is almost all
| consumable Smurfberries and such.
|
| I'm not saying there are no games. Games could easily be
| the biggest section of the App Store. I'm saying there are
| no *good* games, only those designed to force you to make
| IAPs.
|
| _Stand alone_ titles that cost a few bucks (immediately or
| as a one time unlock) are basically dead compared to the
| era before IAPs existed.
| dagmx wrote:
| I think conflating that as a metric of games being good
| is both erroneous and highly subjective.
|
| There are some very highly regarded mobile games that do
| quite well.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The hardware is great for developing games, but the software
| experience is so cumbersome that it makes sense why game devs
| don't port to Apple Silicon:
|
| - You need to port to ARM (not that bad, but now you're
| debugging two versions and increasing your dependency graph)
|
| - You need to distribute on MacOS/iPad (not insurmountable, but
| kowtowing to Apple's ever-changing demands is a different game
| than jumping through Sony/Nintendo's hoops)
|
| - You need to port to Metal (pretty hard, requires Mac-specific
| developers and a separate dev branch)
|
| Of course, there are still devs who spend the extra time to
| make Mac-native games (Factorio and Rimworld), but compared to
| targeting Linux/Windows the effort doesn't make sense. For
| Apple to make their platform an attractive gaming platform,
| they can either a. Allow sideloading < or > b. Welcome third-
| party graphics APIs to Apple Silicon. Unless they sweeten the
| deal though, I doubt we'll see many AAA ports in the future.
| Doches wrote:
| > Mac-native games (Factorio and Rimworld)
|
| Rimworld is actually built in Unity, but without using most
| of Unity's conveniences; I think it just uses it as a sort of
| platform-independent shim: launch an empty scene and then do
| everything with userspace render calls rather than Unity's
| GameObjects. It's certainly not a /typical/ Unity game, but
| nor is it in any way Mac-native.
|
| Not that that detracts from your point, really.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| And I think Factorio uses OpenGL (which is cross-platform
| but deprecated on MacOS) and doesn't distribute via the app
| store, and is only distributed as x86-64[0], bypassing most
| of all three of GP's points.
|
| [0] It was recently announced for Switch, but from what
| I've heard there aren't plans to release it for ARM on
| other platforms in the immediate future.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| > they have really good CPUs, GPUs
|
| The GPUs on macOS and iOS are incredible for mobile processors,
| especially in terms of power efficiency, but they don't compete
| with the GPUs in gaming PCs or current generation consoles.
| baby wrote:
| It's insane to me that after all these years apple is still
| somewhat ignoring the gaming market. I basically haven't played
| any pc games in like 6y due to that. Thanks god there's the
| steamdeck now
| georgeecollins wrote:
| It's a strategy that served them well early in the life of
| the company. In the 80's both Atari and Amiga made better
| price / performance computers than the Apple II. Yeah the Mac
| was great but it wasn't paying the bills at that point. They
| positioned themselves as the "serious" company for business
| and especially in that segment education.
|
| I am saying this as someone who has made games for the
| Macintosh in the 90's and iPhone in 10's. Apple avoids
| pandering to gamers to make sure they seem adult and serious.
| fulafel wrote:
| > If you look at the list of games (https://www.vulkan.org/made-
| with-vulkan) that use Vulkan natively, as presented by the the
| Vulkan team itself, 270 of the of the 407 listed games run on
| Stadia! That is significantly more than half (though it is a
| little unclear how complete this list is).
| [deleted]
| tekchip wrote:
| Looks to me like you have it backwards. Many (most?) of those
| games predate Stadia. Seems Stadia/Google selected Vulkan for
| best compatibility with pre-existing games.
| smoldesu wrote:
| FWIW, there are hundreds (thousands?) of DirectX games that
| _also_ run on Stadia hardware, but won 't because of licensing
| concerns. Google doesn't want to license DirectX through a copy
| of Windows, and I'm guessing that using DXVK would be
| considered "flying too close to the sun".
| Animats wrote:
| In Rust land, the Rend3/WGPU stack is able to target Vulkan and
| Metal, pretty much invisibly to the application. Also Android and
| WebGL, although not as seamlessly, because the threading model is
| different in those worlds. It's supposed to also support DirectX
| on Windows, but since Windows supports Vulkan, why bother? I have
| the same code running on Windows and Linux with no conditional
| compilation in my code.
|
| The Bevy game engine reportedly runs happily on all those
| platforms.
|
| In C++ land, Godot has similar portability. So do UE5 and Unity.
|
| If it wasn't for Apple shooting themselves in the foot with
| Metal, we'd all be on Vulkan now, without these portability
| layers.
| lights0123 wrote:
| Does Android not support standard Vulkan as well?
| Animats wrote:
| Android does support Vulkan. Although I don't think you can
| do graphics from outside the main thread, which is a major
| feature of Vulkan. A key idea in Vulkan is that the main
| thread is just doing refreshes, while other threads are
| changing what's in the GPU. This allows keeping the frame
| rate up even when the scene is changing.
|
| (We've had a split on concurrency. Web devs think in terms of
| callbacks and async, but not real multiple threads running on
| multiple CPUs with explicit locking. Game devs doing high
| performance games think in terms of multiple CPUs and the GPU
| all working in parallel, pumping huge amounts of graphics
| content. WASM and Android follow the web model. There's kind
| of a hack involving multiple processes with some shared
| memory, but it's not general purpose threading.)
| Veliladon wrote:
| I know everyone likes to hate on Apple for doing their own
| thing (and often rightfully so) but Metal predates Vulkan by 18
| months. They needed to do it themselves because something like
| Vulkan/DX12 didn't exist to adapt and the alternative was
| OpenGL ES.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| No RPi vulkan I believe for the embeddable world.
| Animats wrote:
| Right now, someone is trying to get my ui-mock cross platform
| test running on a Raspberry Pi. Current problem involves glib
| 2.0 not available on some version of LUbuntu.
| dagmx wrote:
| I call bullshit. Most games that aren't on Apple platforms
| don't target Vulkan but DX12 instead.
|
| Plus you'd still have different graphics backends needed for
| the consoles.
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