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EXTENDING APPLICATION REACH

Vulkan and Porting Layers

The Vulkan Portability Initiative enables consistent use of open-source porting layers to enable your application to deploy on platforms without Vulkan native drivers, such as macOS and iOS. Vulkan has also been designed to support a variety of porting layers that can bring applications using other APIs, such as Direct3D, to Vulkan-enabled systems.

NAP Framework - Naivi.nl

Vulkan on PC, Linux and MacOS.

Porting NAP Framework to Vulkan

Discover how Naivi.nl ported their NAP Framework to feature parity rapidly, optimized where possible and make sure all the NAP demos run equally well on Windows, Linux and macOS.

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Vulkan Porting Layers

Vulkan Portability

Vulkan Portability Blog

Vulkan Portability Slides

PORTABILITY ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS AND FOR NON-VULKAN APPS

Vulkan Porting Layers

One of the most unique and valuable features of Vulkan is it's ability to support developers who need their applications to run across multiple platforms. Vulkan is a cross-platform API allowing application portability onto additional platforms using layered implementations. PLUS, if you have applications written to other APIs, the low-level Vulkan API efficiently supports translation layers allowing other APIs to run on top of Vulkan. We've listed several of these translation layers below to help you find a solution that best meets your needs.

Vulkan Porting Layers

Vulkan Porting Layers

PORTABILITY ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS AND FOR NON-VULKAN APPS

Vulkan Porting Layers

One of the most unique and valuable features of Vulkan is it's ability to support developers who need their applications to run across multiple platforms. Vulkan is a cross-platform API allowing application portability onto additional platforms using layered implementations. PLUS, if you have applications written to other APIs, the low-level Vulkan API efficiently supports translation layers allowing other APIs to run on top of Vulkan. We've listed several of these translation layers below to help you find a solution that best meets your needs.

    • Ashes: Vulkan on OpenGL and DX9/DX10/DX11

      Ashes is a drop-in replacement or ICD to Vulkan. It allows to write Vulkan code, and to select the rendering API that will be used. It also comes with ashespp, a C++ wrapper for Vulkan.

    • Dozen: Vulkan on DX12

      Microsoft engineers have added support for the Agility SDK to their Mesa D3D12 driver. The Agility SDK now has support for Vulkan’s “Dzn” (Dozen) driver on D3D12.

    • MoltenVK: Vulkan on Metal

      The Vulkan SDK includes a MoltenVK runtime library for macOS. If you are developing a Vulkan application for macOS, it is highly recommended that you use the Vulkan SDK and the MoltenVK library included in it.

    • Zink: OpenGL on Vulkan (Linux)

      The Zink driver is a Gallium driver that emits Vulkan API calls instead of targeting a specific GPU architecture. This can be used to get full desktop OpenGL support on devices that only support Vulkan.

    • clvk: OpenCL on Vulkan

      clvk is a prototype implementation of OpenCL 3.0 on top of Vulkan using clspv as the compiler.

    • GLOVE: OpenGL ES and EGL on Vulkan

      GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) is a cross-platform software library that acts as an intermediate layer between an OpenGL ES application and Vulkan.

    • Angle: OpenGL ES on Vulkan

      ANGLE allows users of multiple operating systems to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES content by translating OpenGL ES API calls to one of the hardware-supported APIs available for that platform.

    • vkd3d-proton: DX12 on Vulkan

      VKD3D-Proton is a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan. The project serves as the development effort for Direct3D 12 support in Proton.

    • DXVK: D3D 9/10/11 on Vulkan

      DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.

    • Wine

      Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD.

    • CodeWeavers CrossOver

      CrossOver uses Wine and VKD3D to let you run many Microsoft applications on your Linux and Mac platforms without the need for Windows emulators.

    • Vulkan GPUInfo

      The Vulkan GPU hardware capability viewer is a community-driven Vulkan hardware database, an online tool for developers that want to check out GPU hardware capabilities. This database and the client applications to submit reports are developed and maintained by me (Sascha Willems) in my spare time.

    • Vulkan Capabilities Viewer (iOS)

      For developers using Vulkan layered over the Metal graphics API, this tool enumerates all the hardware capabilities and limitations of the device it is run on.

DEPLOY VULKAN APPLICATIONS ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS

Vulkan Portability Initiative

Vulkan® Portability™ fights platform fragmentation by enabling the consistent use of layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, DX12 and other APIs. The Vulkan Portability extension standardizes queries for available layered API functionality and enables all provided functionality to be conformance tested. MoltenVK is a leading example of a layered Vulkan Portability implementation that runs over Apple’s Metal API.

Vulkan Portability Initiative

Path of Exile - Grinding Gear Games

DEPLOY VULKAN APPLICATIONS ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS

Vulkan Portability Initiative

Vulkan® Portability™ fights platform fragmentation by enabling the consistent use of layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, DX12 and other APIs. The Vulkan Portability extension standardizes queries for available layered API functionality and enables all provided functionality to be conformance tested. MoltenVK is a leading example of a layered Vulkan Portability implementation that runs over Apple’s Metal API.

  • A provisional version of Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 was released in September 2020 and is shipping today in both MoltenVK and gfx-portability

    Find Out More

  • This repository provides a focus and tools to help application developers understand and provide input to the Vulkan Portability initiative, including the VK_KHR_portability_subset Vulkan extension.

    Find Out More

  • The Vulkan SDK includes a MoltenVK runtime library for macOS. If you are developing a Vulkan application for macOS, it is highly recommended that you use the Vulkan SDK and the MoltenVK library included in it.

    Find Out More

"All in all, we’re pleased with what we’ve managed to accomplish. A barrier that many, including ourselves, originally thought unbreakable has been cracked wide open, and the best part is: this is just the beginning. With not only our own efforts to improve the core emulation, but upcoming updates to Metal 3 and the constantly improving MoltenVK, the experience is only going to get better."

"We will be relying on MoltenVK to be the benchmark that we compare our native Metal backend against going forward. And it should perform that role excellently, as it is bringing our well tested Vulkan backend to macOS through a very well supported translation layer from a team that has earned our trust. So, while our new native Metal backend is faster, MoltenVK is here to stay. Together, they will help us deliver the most consistently reliable and performant experience that we can give to our macOS users"

"I was initially skeptical about the use of a Vulkan translation layer to Metal, but it turns out MoltenVK enables applications using the real-time NAP Framework to run as well on macOS as they do on Linux and Windows. This is something I would like to highlight and stress the importance of - without the portability of Vulkan we would have been forced to implement a special Metal rendering backend just for macOS users, something not doable for a relatively small company such as ours. Plus switching to Vulkan dramatically improved render-times for Mac users."

Coen Klosters Lead Developer of NAP Framework and Technical Director at Naivi

"Valve extended Dota 2 to use Vulkan and ported that version to macOS using MoltenVK. This port achieved significantly higher performance than the native Apple OpenGL® drivers. Valve has now shipped multiple games titles on macoS and iOS using MoltenVK and we believe that Vulkan Portability can significantly reduce development and porting costs for any developer supporting multiple platforms."

Pierre-Loup Griffais Valve

“With MoltenVK, we've worked hard to bring a consistent Vulkan-based API to macOS and iOS while maintaining the performance improvements required by modern game developers.”

"MoltenVK has been hugely valuable to us by providing the ability to execute our Vulkan code on Apple platforms without any discernable performance penalty versus writing a native Metal implementation but more importantly without requiring any modification of the code itself."