zlacker

>>6a74+(OP)
> Tessellation enables games like The Witcher 3 to generate geometry. The M1 has hardware tessellation, but it is too limited for DirectX, Vulkan, or OpenGL. We must instead tessellate with arcane compute shaders

> Geometry shaders are an older, cruder method to generate geometry. Like tessellation, the M1 lacks geometry shader hardware so we emulate with compute.

Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan themselves? Because they don't want to implement common Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal performance?

(I realize performance is still relatively fast in practice, which is awesome!)

>>Wowfun+571
> Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan? Because they don't want to implement common Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal performance?

Yes, it's a big reason.

I tried to port the yuzu switch emulator to macos a few years ago, and you end up having to write compute shaders that emulate the geometry shaders to make that work.

Even fairly modern games like Mario Odyssey use geometry shaders.

Needless to say, I was not enough of a wizard to make this happen!

>>VHRang+uc1
Why Apple does not just implement it? They have more resources than anyone in the world. Patents?

>>miohta+Ui1
Because they don't care. They've decided that Metal is The One True Way to write 3D-accelerated apps on macOS, so they only implement the things in hardware that Metal requires.

>>kelnos+Rl1
Perhaps, but also geometry shaders are generally losing popularity and on their way out. Per google ai search result (for what it is worth):

Geometry shaders are generally considered less necessary in modern graphics pipelines due to the rise of more flexible and efficient alternatives like mesh shaders which can perform similar geometry manipulation tasks with often better performance and more streamlined workflows