Some fun news for Blender fans, as their work to bring up Vulkan support in the project has hit a big new milestone with support now enabled but it's still experimental for now. As noted in their development blog post, Vulkan support is now available for Linux and Windows Alpha builds.
Why are they doing this? Well, like a lot of other projects including game engines, OpenGL is old. Vulkan is the true next-generation of fully open graphics and it supports a lot of modern features. Eventually, pretty much everything will move over to Vulkan to take advantage of all the new stuff.
The Blender team mentioned that for Apple devices they already support Metal, so they will be going all-in eventually on Vulkan for Linux and Windows. They gave some examples of things that could be worked on utilizing newly available GPU features thanks to using modern graphics APIs like:
- Improve the viewport performance with huge amount of geometry and complex scenes.
- Improving the quality of EEVEE by replacing screen space effects with hardware ray tracing implementations.
- Adding support for HDRI displays.
- Utilizing the compute power of GPUs in areas like texture painting.
They need your help! As Vulkan is in heavy development, they want to ensure it runs well so check out their status thread.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments
BlackBloodRum Oct 20, 2023
I never did get why Apple decided to ignore Vulkan and keep only Metal. 
I understand technically, Metal came first, but they could have added Vulkan later on. I mean, I like heavy metal as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one.
But then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
I understand technically, Metal came first, but they could have added Vulkan later on. I mean, I like heavy metal as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one.
But then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
6 Likes, Who?
Quoting: BlackBloodRumBut then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
It’s been almost 5 years since 32bit support was axed. It’s not exactly a recent development.
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Quoting: Jmsnz2023 somehow marks when there are zero supported options (though still and forever possible via VM)... but I didn't get how it was possible beyond VMs until now.Quoting: BlackBloodRumBut then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
It’s been almost 5 years since 32bit support was axed. It’s not exactly a recent development.
Gaming is a special case in software development, because it's very frequently "done" when released, not something the devs will go back to again and again to work on features, improvements, refactoring, etc.
It's also a special case because games are irreplaceable. eg: as much as I love Two Point Hospital it does not superseed Theme Hospital, it's just another game in the same genre. There is always going to be a demand to run the original Theme Hospital game.
Those things go directly against Apple's choice weapon to coax app devs into keeping their shit together, which is their usual "update your app or it will be cut from the store". It works for apps with active devs, and those who don't have them will end up being replaced by those equivalents that do... except games usually don't.
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Quoting: MarlockQuoting: Jmsnz2023 somehow marks when there are zero supported options (though still and forever possible via VM)... but I didn't get how it was possible beyond VMs until now.Quoting: BlackBloodRumBut then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
It’s been almost 5 years since 32bit support was axed. It’s not exactly a recent development.
Gaming is a special case in software development, because it's very frequently "done" when released, not something the devs will go back to again and again to work on features, improvements, refactoring, etc.
It's also a special case because games are irreplaceable. eg: as much as I love Two Point Hospital it does not superseed Theme Hospital, it's just another game in the same genre. There is always going to be a demand to run the original Theme Hospital game.
Those things go directly against Apple's choice weapon to coax app devs into keeping their shit together, which is their usual "update your app or it will be cut from the store". It works for apps with active devs, and those who don't have them will end up being replaced by those equivalents that do... except games usually don't.
Crossover is wonderful. If you want to run 32bit (windows) games/apps on macOS. That’s the only supported way to do it. Anything that is 64bit still runs natively today thanks to Rosetta. It’s not all doom and gloom.
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Quoting: BlackBloodRumI never did get why Apple decided to ignore Vulkan and keep only Metal.
I understand technically, Metal came first, but they could have added Vulkan later on. I mean, I like heavy metal as much as the next guy, but I can't help but feel they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one.
But then, we're talking about Apple here, who intentionally killed the majority of MacOS native Steam games on their OS (they won't run on the latest OSX due to Apple's changes).
I think the result of MacOS gaming being thrown under the bus due to metal is just collateral damage of their strategy with iOS. Most mobile devs develop for iOS and then they port to Android, best case scenario both versions are developed in parallel. Metal is just putting sticks in the wheel to that situation,
With iOS they have the majority of the (paying) users, with MacOS they have a niche audience and it seems they do not mind being mistreated.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: elgatilI think the result of MacOS gaming being thrown under the bus due to metal is just collateral damage of their strategy with iOS. Most mobile devs develop for iOS and then they port to Android, best case scenario both versions are developed in parallel. Metal is just putting sticks in the wheel to that situation,
With iOS they have the majority of the (paying) users, with MacOS they have a niche audience and it seems they do not mind being mistreated.
The death of old macOS games on steam had nothing to do with metal. It was the loss of 32bit support that did that.
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BlackBloodRum Oct 22, 2023
Quoting: JmsnzYup. I understand why they wanted to drop 32-bit support. But they could have added some kind of compatibility layer, even if it meant something like Wine or sandboxed libraries or such. They could have handled the whole thing better instead of just "as of this release, 32-bit is gone and there's nothing you can do about it.".Quoting: elgatilI think the result of MacOS gaming being thrown under the bus due to metal is just collateral damage of their strategy with iOS. Most mobile devs develop for iOS and then they port to Android, best case scenario both versions are developed in parallel. Metal is just putting sticks in the wheel to that situation,
With iOS they have the majority of the (paying) users, with MacOS they have a niche audience and it seems they do not mind being mistreated.
The death of old macOS games on steam had nothing to do with metal. It was the loss of 32bit support that did that.
I really felt that was a massive FU to their customer base.
(For those about to say "But some Linux distros dropped 32-bit!", they did, but there are other distros which still have the support, users still have options available to them. That and often, you can still go put the 32-bit libs back in.)
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No, no, I'm not buying that (the distro mindset I mean). Notice that it's the commercial ones that balk the most. The ones that should have the most resources need to "concentrate them" but community distros happily build you everything you need :-)
P.S. Wine is actually working on that very thing, with WoW64 builds. It's not quite there yet, to replace "lib32" but there will likely come a day where you won't need a lib32 back end.
Last edited by Grogan on 23 October 2023 at 1:35 am UTC
P.S. Wine is actually working on that very thing, with WoW64 builds. It's not quite there yet, to replace "lib32" but there will likely come a day where you won't need a lib32 back end.
Last edited by Grogan on 23 October 2023 at 1:35 am UTC
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