Free and Open-Source Vulkan on macOS and iOS
February 26, 2018 – A Vulkan-compatible driver for macOS and iOS, MoltenVK, is now available free of charge and open-source
[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK].
Having invested into its development for more than a year, we have sponsored The Brenwill Workshop to donate MoltenVK for inclusion in the Vulkan graphics ecosystem. We’ve also continued our efforts with LunarG who is today releasing a corresponding update to deliver macOS support to the Vulkan SDK. Also as a result of that work, Dota 2 will soon be updated to target Vulkan on macOS.
It’s been almost four years since we started contributing to Vulkan’s goal of becoming a cross platform solution. With support for Windows, Linux, and Android crossed off the list, this latest set of updates checks off one of the largest remaining targets, giving developers an easy yet robust way to also target their Vulkan-based engines and titles to run on macOS and iOS. By making the code to MoltenVK freely available and open-source, the goal is to enable developers to bring their games to macOS and iOS with minimal development cost.
The LunarG Vulkan SDK is a key component for developers targeting using the architecture by providing tools such as validation layers, shader compilers, and a loader. Now available from LunarG [https://vulkan.lunarg.com/], an updated SDK now offers those same tools to developers targeting macOS, enabling them to efficiently develop the code on the platform.
Additionally, we exercised MoltenVK with real world workloads including Dota 2 and we’re seeing significant performance improvements over
running on OpenGL.
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