Vulkan, as a Khronos open standard, likely wouldn't exist if Apple didn't make Metal. Khronos was content for OpenGL{ES} to sputter ad infinitum until it realized that its largest platform (iOS/macOS) was moving on. It helped that the rest of the industry (MS, AMD) was also moving in the same direction, but it was the release of Metal that broke the camel's back.

There were several efforts in the past to revamp OpenGL (e.g. long's peak), but they all failed. OpenGL was stuck and there was little reason to think the situation would improve. Writing OpenGL code that worked across multiple platforms was worse than it is today to write multiple per-graphics-API render backends.

If anything the current crop of new graphics APIs (Metal, Vulkan, and DX12) all owes their start to AMD's Mantle project. Metal certainly didn't get the ball rolling, although it almost certainly accelerated Khronos's path to standardization & shipping (which is why Vulkan adopted Mantle as the base, to ship quicker). AMD gets that claim.

OpenGL was not stuck, either. OpenGL's AZDO project was alive & well: https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20... (just not on macOS because AZDO is GL4.2+ whereas macOS is stuck on 4.1)

Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have great API's that are not opengl or vulkan.

I am not saying opengl or vulkan is bad.

Apple doesn’t count, they just recently moved to Metal from standard OpenGL. Do consoles use something custom? Not OpenGL?

Apple doesn't count? did you RTFA? It's all about apple and proprietary graphics API's.

Apple Metal launched in 2014.

Sony and Nintendo and NEVER used OpenGL for anything extensive. Sony talked the talk around 2005 and 2006 with the launch of the PS3 and OpenGL ES but PSGL was always more performant.

The Nintendo Switch supports OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan: https://wccftech.com/nintendo-switch-supports-vulkan/

Switch supports Vulkan and their own low level API, NVN.

Source https://developer.nintendo.com/

Just like Sony did in the past with the PS 3 and GL ES 1.0, they are just testing waters to see which way devs go.

In the PS3 devs preferred to pick Sony's API instead.

That's just dandy. Show me software that uses it. This is 2005 all over again. You make that deal. You talk to that support. You prove me wrong, please do! The better support, debuggers, and feature requests will come from the native API.

PLEASE prove me wrong.

After months of devkits with the real api ...

I did RTFA, but you were saying the OpenGL dream has been dead for a long time, which I took to mean pre-2014 ;)

Uou have convinced me that Metal might not be so bad... at least is all the consoles have custom APIs then it’s not as unusual as I thought.

You mean gcm? PSGL is the ps3 OpenGL implementation afaik

Consoles don’t use OpenGL.... even when they say they support it ;)

Yeah it might look this way if you never used graphics APIs... truth is it has never been possible to write code against OpenGL for all platforms without extra platform specifics ... it’s also never been anything but trivial to wrap graphics so that the backend is switchable. Metal, mantle, Vulcan, dx12 have done nothing to change that