alt Hacker NewsOpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan.
If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
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> why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later?
Why is this the dichotomy? Why not support both?
> If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
I have a natural inclination to agree with this thinking, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the sunk cost fallacy at work[1].
In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens.
Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
> OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR.
Vulkan and DirectX are the favored graphics rendering technologies for VR.
Godot supports Vulkan rendering via OpenXR.
To get a vibe for Apple’s general posture in this regard it is worth noting that Vulkan rendering through OpenXR on macOS is technically possible via MoltenVK, but macOS does not have an official OpenXR runtime. You’d need to use third-party workarounds or wait for broader support.