flight50 wrote: ↑24 Jan 2023 15:29
I'm sure SCS's goal is to keep all platforms going. Excluding Mac wouldn't be wise even if the numbers are smaller than pc. If Vulkan updates PC outside of Windows, that's the answer. I assume MacOS is something different. Its MoltenVK which is part of SDK.......whatever that is. At least this is what a quick Google search came up with. I'd imagine open beta kicks off with DX12 first and then bring the other platforms up to speed. Get DX12 working for the community before introducing the others. Seems like less work that way. Could be a matter of days, could be a matter of weeks but I'm sure they'll cover everyone that they do now.
OS X (and iOS for that matter) do not support Vulkan and of course also not DX12, but instead Apple defined their own API called Metal, which is basically a copy of AMD's Mantle that is the basis for the DX12 and Vulkan development as well.
Why? Because it's Apple, and they really like doing something that is not the standard, even if it does the exact same thing as the standard.
Anyway … MoltenVK is a transition layer that translates Vulkan calls into Metal calls, thus allowing Vulkan applications to run on OS X, at least if all of the other OS-specific stuff was taken care of.
So it's kind of similar to DXVK (which implements DX9-DX11 on top of Vulkan) and VKD3D (which translates DX12 to Vulkan).
Whether there is feature-parity between Vulkan and Metal, I don't know. I'm not an OS X user, so my interest in Metal is relatively low.
I also don't know if there are already any games out there that use Vulkan and MoltenVK to run on OS X.
In general, I'm a bit more skeptical if they will continue to support OS X and Linux.
At least the Linux version has a couple of significant short comings that are not being fixed, e.g. radio streams are not available and iirc pedestrians don't work on Linux as well as some other graphics settings.
If I would look closer, I'd surely find other things, too.
In the changelog, OSX was only mentioned 3 times, the last time in the 1.22 update in 2015. Linux was mentioned 2 times, the last time in October 2021 (some FFB improvements).
Well and of course the elephant in the room, OpenGL, but I guess we've talked enough about that already.
That's why I asked about Linux support, because if they say that there won't any more improvements, we might as well bury that version and try to get the Windows/DX11 (or then DX12) version running as best as possible.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's really an option on OS X, since Proton, DXVK and VKD3D aren't available there, afaik.