> 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!)
Interestingly, Apple was on the list of the initial Vulkan backers — but they pulled out at some point before the first version was released. I suppose they saw the API moving in the direction they were not interested in. So far, their strategy has been a mixed bag. They failed to attract substantial developer interest, at the same time they delivered what I consider to be the best general-purpose GPU API around.
Regarding programmable tessellation, Apple's approach is mesh shaders. As far as I am aware, they are the only platform that offers standard mesh shader functionality across all devices.