New, open Vulkan gaming driver for Apple's M1 hardware
Honeykrisp offers an open Vulkan 3D graphics driver for Apple's M1 hardware, independent of the OS, unlocking new gaming possibilities.
(Image: dpa, picture alliance / Peter Kneffel/dpa)
The open source developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has published a Vulkan graphics driver for Apple M1 hardware. This makes it possible to develop or port Vulkan-based applications and games for the M1 hardware, regardless of the operating system.
Rosenzweig professionally develops graphics drivers for Asahi-Linux, which specializes in Apple Silicon hardware. According to the author, the new driver, called Honeykrisp, is the first driver for Apple hardware that is fully compliant with the Vulkan 1.3 specifications. It is based on NVK, a Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware in Mesa, which in turn is based on the Vulkan driver for Intel systems.
At the beginning, the author feared problems with the adaptation: "In the beginning, there will be friction, as Nvidia's desktop architecture differs from the mobile roots of the M1." Nevertheless, she managed to complete Honeykrisp in less than thirty days, as she describes in detail in her blog post.
Users in various forums are correspondingly enthusiastic: "A very impressive piece of work and a great testimony to the value of shared, incrementally developed and open components." And: "This shows what a big mistake it was on Apple's part to ignore Vulkan over the last ten years."
However, others are also critical: "Much of the Vulkan support was motivated by Stadia, not so much because Stadia was successful, but because Google shoveled huge amounts of money to developers ... When Stadia was discontinued at the end of 2022, the number of new Vulkan games actually plummeted immediately."
Honeykrisp is not yet available as a library for end users. However, developers can download the sources from GitLab.
The Vulkan 3D graphics library is based on AMD Mantle, which was ultimately discontinued in favor of Vulkan. In contrast to OpenGL, it is closer to the hardware and offers better parallelization, which increases performance but also the programming effort. With extensions such as VK_IMG_relaxed_line_rasterization or Zink-Mesa, the first steps have been taken to emulate OpenGL on Vulkan, from which Apple Silicon could in turn benefit via Honeykrisp.
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