[HN Gopher] KosmicKrisp a Vulkan on Metal Mesa 3D Graphics Driver
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KosmicKrisp a Vulkan on Metal Mesa 3D Graphics Driver
Author : Degenerative
Score : 16 points
Date : 2025-08-12 06:37 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lunarg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lunarg.com)
| lawlessone wrote:
| Are metal GPU's good? I've admit for purely ideological reasons
| i've never really looked into how powerful they are
| bigyabai wrote:
| For raster, they're pretty good and fabbed on dense nodes. For
| compute, nothing special.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, it is the best next generation API, and the only one that
| fully supports C++ (C++14 with extensions) on the GPU.
|
| It is also the only native 3D API designed for managed
| languages, in Objective-C with Swift bindings.
|
| DirectX is the land of COM, C++, write your own bindings, HLSL
| isn't quite C++, although is getting there.
|
| Vulkan is the second coming of extension spaghetti, GLSL is
| stagnant to the point everyone was using HLSL instead, now
| there is Slang, still outside C and C++, write your own
| bindings.
|
| LibGNM and LibGMX are basically C and C++ land, and PSGL is an
| evolution from HLSL.
|
| NVN is a mix of OpenGL and Vulkan, and equally C and C++ land.
|
| Then there are all the MetalKits, that no OS vendor has similar
| offerings.
| wmf wrote:
| The announcement is pretty confusing since Mesa is used on Linux
| but Metal only exists on macOS/iOS. I guess this is only for
| Linux VMs running on macOS such as the Android emulator. Maybe it
| could also be used to run desktop Linux in a VM.
| lights0123 wrote:
| Mesa can be used on other operating systems. See
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Windows-Kopper-Progress for
| an example of using its OpenGL-to-Vulkan translator on Windows.
| jchw wrote:
| Mesa is also usable on other platforms, including Windows and
| macOS.
|
| It's even theoretically possible to use the Asahi Linux
| hardware Mesa drivers on macOS, though actually doing so would
| involve hacking around undocumented APIs. I actually thought
| this was demonstrated before (during early testing) but I can't
| find it.
|
| Someone else managed to get the RADV AMD driver working on
| Windows[1]. It is not fully merged upstream yet, but I think
| they would like to get it merged upstream eventually.
|
| Windows 10 on ARM (maybe Windows 11?) also use Mesa with
| Microsoft and Collabora's d3d12 backend to run OpenGL and
| OpenCL applications on top of d3d12, for hardware that does not
| have proper OpenGL and OpenCL drivers[2].
|
| And of course, it ought to be possible to use llvmpipe/lavapipe
| with off-screen rendering pretty much anywhere you can get Mesa
| to build, although in practice I believe SwiftShader usually
| nets you a lot better performance if it's applicable.
|
| So Mesa is actually _not_ used only on Linux, it can be used
| pretty much anywhere, actually ships with Windows, and of
| course many other free software operating systems also ship
| Mesa.
|
| [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Windows-XDC-2024
|
| [2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-the-
| opencl...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mesa has taken a middleware role for quite some time now.
| wmf wrote:
| What macOS apps use Mesa?
| coffeeaddict1 wrote:
| This is nice, but what I really would like is for someone to make
| the Zink + MoltenVK/KosmicKrisp combo so that we can have OpenGL
| 4.1+ support on macOS. It's somewhat disappointing that the only
| way to utilise the latest OpenGL on Macs is to use Asahi Linux.
| shmerl wrote:
| People jumping through hoops with smart tricks, because Apple are
| too stuck up to support Vulkan natively.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just wait when they hear about game consoles.
|
| Apparently game devs have been doing just fine with middleware
| solution since the days of Atari.
| shmerl wrote:
| Apple doesn't care about gamers, so gamers shouldn't care
| about Apple.
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