Vulkan Comes To Apple Silicon GPUs / M1 By Means Of MoltenVK 1.1.1

While Apple continues to drive their own Metal graphics/compute API, Vulkan support built atop Metal continues to mature thanks to the open-source MoltenVK project. With the MoltenVK's latest update is now support for Apple Silicon with the M1's new GPU.

MoltenVK 1.1.1 was released on Wednesday and while the version number may seem like an insignificant update, it's actually a big one. There are a number of updates in this release for Vulkan-on-Metal and is rounded out by the initial Apple M1 "Apple Silicon" support. Apple Silicon needed some additional GPU pixel formats support and different device properties to be set, among other tweaks for this brand new Apple hardware.

The MoltenVK update also supports the "Mac Catalyst" platform for iOS apps running on macOS 11.0+, which is working on both x86_64 and ARM64.

MoltenVK 1.1.1 also brings support for several more Vulkan extensions like KHR_timeline_semaphore, EXT_private_data, EXT_post_depth_coverage, EXT_texture_compression_astc_hdr, and AMD_shader_image_load_store.

MoltenVK 1.1.1 is also better handling device loss events, features many fixes, and a wide variety of other improvements.

More details on this MoltenVK update for allowing the Vulkan API to function on Apple's macOS and iOS can be found via GitHub.