By Darren Allan
Khronos Group has just unleashed MoltenVK, a new implementation of Vulkan for Apple’s Metal graphics framework, allowing developers to build Vulkan-powered games and apps for Mac computers (and also iOS devices) – with major potential benefits in terms of faster frame rates.
MoltenVK is essentially a layer that sits on top of Metal, effectively translating and allowing Vulkan games to work seamlessly with Apple’s graphics framework. At the very least, it will do so with very little overheads – and not much difference in overall functionality from running straight Vulkan (although not every feature of the latter will be carried across).
In case you’ve forgotten, Vulkan was introduced three years back by the Khronos Group as a cross-platform and low-overhead API (application programming interface). For Macs, it potentially represents a much slicker way of operating than the OpenGL drivers on macOS – which are clunky and outdated.
Thrash Metal
As Ars Technica spotted, Valve is putting its weight behind MoltenVK, and has demonstrated that Dota 2 on the Mac can witness frame rate boosts of up to 50% compared to the performance seen with OpenGL.
That’s a best case scenario, and some of the gains are much more modest – …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Gaming
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