The Khronos Group has released an update to the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Vulkan, which officially covers Apple’s platforms. It is based on Vulkan Portability and also covers Apple Silicon. This allows developers to write cross-platform applications on Vulkan instead of implementing them natively for Apple’s own Metal graphic architecture. Vulkan applications also run on Apple Silicon via Universal Binaries.

The Vulkan stands on metal In September the Khronos Group published the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0, which enables Vulkan SDK calls on other than the natively supported hardware platforms. The main focus was on implementing macOS, iOS and tvOS, since Apple does not allow Vulkan drivers for its own operating systems.

The open source project MoltenVK is a central component of the portability layer. It offers an implementation of Vulkan 1.1 for Apple Metal and thus allows development on Vulkan and execution on Metal. There is also the open-source library gfx-portability, which offers portability via the abstraction layer gfx-hal.

A wide base enables the execution of Vulkan applications on Apple platforms.

(Image: Khronos Group)

Layers of the volcano As part of the updated SDK, LunarG has officially published its Device Simulation Layer (DevSim), which was previously only available for Linux and Windows, for macOS as well. This layer enables cross-platform development on more or less any source and target platform, for example to write a Vulkan application for certain iPhone models on Windows. The respective configurations for the properties of the hardware are stored in JSON files.

In addition, the properties of the hardware on Apple systems can be determined via the Hardware Capability Viewer, the entries for the public database gpuinfo. org created. In addition, the official macOS SDK for Vulkan contains the Vulkaninfo tool for the automatic creation of DevSim configuration files. It also comes with pre-configured configurations for certain Mac, iPad and iPhone devices.

Further details on the updated Vulkan SDK can be found on the Khronos blog. An updated overview of the Vulkan Portability Initiative can be found in a separate presentation in PDF format.

(rme)