Open-Source Project Trying To Map Vulkan Onto Direct3D 12 & Metal

While we are seeing exciting projects at the moment about mapping Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (as well as D3D9 and D3D12 over Vulkan projects too), there are new open-source projects for mapping Vulkan over Direct3D 12 and Metal.

New VulkanOnD3D12 and VulkanOnMetal open-source projects by the Chabloom project/company are looking to map this open-source, low-level graphics/compute API over other proprietary low-level APIs from Microsoft and Apple. Yes, there is the MoltenVK project that has already begun working to show Vulkan on macOS systems by mapping it to Apple's Metal drivers, but MoltenVK isn't free software / open-source. Now there's VulkanOnMetal as this separate project start-up and then VulkanOnD3D12, although I believe all Windows 10 drivers that have Direct3D 12 support also have Vulkan drivers available. So the effectiveness there may be less, but an interesting technical exercise nevertheless.

VulkanOnD3D12 was started last summer but in recent days has begun seeing new commits. VulkanOnMetal is a similar story.

It will be interesting to see how far these projects get and if they can stand the test of time. With the DXVK project for getting Direct3D 11 running on Vulkan has been advancing extremely quickly, so we'll see the potential now for Vulkan to Direct3D 12 / Metal.

At the same time though Khronos is still pursuing a Vulkan portability initiative notably for macOS support and we'll see where that low-level 3D portability work leads in 2018.