Khronos Announces Open Source Tools for Vulkan Support on macOS and iOS

Khronos, the organization behind the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs, among others, has announced that it has partnered with Valve and other companies to make several open source tools available to support Vulkan on macOS and iOS.

According to Khronos, the other companies are The Brenwill Workshop and LunarG, both of which are releasing software as part of the Vulkan Portability Initiative. Among them is MoltenVK from Brenwill, a software library that should convert calls from Vulkan into calls from Apple’s own Metal API. MoltenVK will be free to use by all developers, Khronos said. In addition, the LunarG Vulkan SDK has been made open source. It allows developers to build and debug Vulkan applications on macOS.

Phoronix writes that it is unclear how the agreement between the companies came about. It would only be apparent that it is thanks to Valve that Brenwill wanted to make his software open source. Valve itself plans to release Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS via an update in the coming months. According to Valve, which already used MoltenVK internally, this version runs faster than the version with native OpenGL support.

The 1.0 version of the Vulkan api was released by Khronos just over two years ago. It is a low-level API for controlling the GPU. The api is largely derived from AMD’s Mantle and provides direct access to deeper layers of graphics hardware, reducing overhead.