You're talking about macOS. We're talking about AGX2. If you want to complain about Apple's API support in macOS, a discussion about AGX2 support for Linux is not the right venue.

I am, quite honestly, getting very tired of all the off-topic gratuitous Apple bashing in articles about our Linux porting project.

Shmerl pops up on every thread mentioning Vulkan/Apple spouting conspiracy theory nonsense that every design decision is some kind of evil plan to screw over open standards. Ignore him.

Keep up the great work, plenty of people really appreciate it.

And keeps forgeting no one in the games industry, or console vendors for that matter, cares about his conspiracy theories.

Yup, I doubt he has experience working in the games industry. Many engines support multiple graphics APIs and there's often only 1-2 employees implementing/maintaining them so speaking about vendor lock-in is not a strong argument.

How is that a counter argument to anything? The need to support multiple APIs is not free. It's a tax on everything else.

You're right that it's not free. But compared to the whole game engine codebase size the renderer backend is usually not big.

It is a waste of time that could be avoided. And exists only becasue of insistence on lock-in by the likes of Apple.

Lock-in proponents bring their kool aid. Not impressed. Gaming industry is pretty messed up when it comes to lock-in. Everyone is paying this tax.

I am aware of my limitations as human being in this society, speak from actual work experience, and will use any tooling that I rant about when it is on the best interests of the customers, regardless of my personal agenda.

Something to think about, or maybe not.

Yes I agree it's tiresome, I wish hacker news had rules against people making bad faith arguments more so than they do now.

Your argument is equivalent to criticizing ARM for putting in instructions to optimize Javascript into their architecture, as if that "sabotages" every other programming language. Or Intel for putting in instructions to optimize AES into their architecture, as if that "sabotages" Salsa20.

It doesn't make any sense. Of course Apple optimizes Metal for their GPUs and their GPUs for Metal. None of that is hostile towards other APIs. All of this hardware is Turing-complete and by definition can implement any conceivable graphics API. The only question is how well it performs with those APIs, and until we have benchmark numbers, your argument is based on assumptions lacking any evidence.

I'm not sure what Turing completeness argument has to do with anything. Turing machine is also Turing complete. You are going to make GPUs like that.

We are talking about a simple fact - Apple don't care to collaborate on Vulkan, neither when designing their GPUs nor for their OS. I see no point to further argue about facts. And I see criticism of that as completely valid.

Supporting both Vulkan and Metal in a game engine is not a huge task. I work in the games industry, my job is to implement and maintain graphics backends to a renderer engine, so I can speak from experience.

Huge or not, duplication of effort is a tax. And no, it's not trivial as you claim. Especially when some engine wasn't designed from the ground up to address these differences.

I think you haven't effectively countered their point.

Why should they support vulkan? what does apple get out of that apart from less well optimised compute and shader code, using more battery and producing more heat for the same output. (the reason it would be less well optimised is Vulkan is an API designed by a group to be the best compromise of many GPU vendors.

If apple wanted to support vulkan without it being worse than Metal they would either need to add so many apple only extensions that it would be Vulkan in name only or make their GPUs be identical to AMD or Nvidia (unfortunately due to IP patents apple can't just make a copy of AMDs GPUs they need to find another IP partner and that is PowerVR).

If PowerVR had 80% of the GPU market (like Nvidia) the would have pushed Vulkan to line up with a TBDR pipeline but they do not so while you can run Vulkan on a TBDR pipeline you end up throwing away lots and lots of optimisations.

AGX (and SGX) aren't the only TBDR architecture. ARM Mali GPUs are also TBDR, are in plenty of phones, and run Vulkan just fine.

Adding to this, that whole render pass concept in the Vulkan API was the TBDR vendors being very active contributors to the API. More explicitly describing the data flow there allows TBDR arch's to work on multiple parts of modern render graphs simultaneously and keep their tiles filled with work in places where the other synchronization methods wouldn't (or would require the kind of divination on the part of the driver that Vulkan is trying to avoid).

And Larrabee!!! It was the tilyest of them all!

Android developers wouldn't say phones run Vulkan just fine, unless when talking about Samsung and Google devices.

Hence why Google made it a compulsory API on Android 10, to try to tame OEMs in improving their Vulkan story, and yet it is a plain Vulkan 1.1.