MoltenVK 1.0.20 Released To Continue Advancing Vulkan On macOS

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 4 September 2018 at 05:42 PM EDT. 30 Comments
VULKAN
MoltenVK continues getting better for offering Vulkan graphics/compute support on macOS by leveraging it on top of Apple's Metal drivers.

MoltenVK 1.0.20 is out as the latest feature update to this Vulkan-over-Metal layer. MoltenVK is notably used by Valve's Dota 2 on macOS, is becoming used by Wine, presumably will also be picked up for Windows Steam Play on macOS in the future, and so far also seems to being used by at least a few different indie game studios on macOS or iOS. This is good news for Linux users with ensuring Vulkan is a common denominator across platforms, avoiding fragmentation if VKD3D/DXVK had to be rewritten for Mac, etc.

With the MoltenVK 1.0.20 release there is support for several new extensions including VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_KHR_shader_draw_parameters, VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2, and VK_KHR_push_descriptor.

MoltenVK 1.0.20 also adds the ability to track and access supported/enabled extensions and has re-based its SPIRV-Cross code against upstream.

More details and downloads for MoltenVK via GitHub.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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