Yes, I have to agree, from a business perspective, it totally makes sense to also port Metal to OS X for at least two reasons: There better be! Let's just hope the Apple logo on the Khronos site doesn't just sit there for nothing! That is, Apple would just be "watching" what others were (not) doing. At any rate, Metal appears to be more programmer-friendly, as well as more easily extensible. I think it is very likely that Metal/Vulkan will end up more or less feature-equivalent so that Vulkan can be implemented as a thin library on top of Metal. And there might be some interaction with the Vulkan team.
I am also more then sure that Apple is being consulted by IHVs and maybe even major OS X/iOS game developers for creating these APIs.
#Sam broadcaster 4.2.2 4shared drivers#
This is very different from how OpenGL drivers on other platforms usually work, where the IHV would usually ship a full OpenGL implementation. The hardware vendors supply a much smaller driver that talks a protocol designed by Apple. So most of the OpenGL logic on OS X is actually directly implemented by Apple. And then there is a IHV (AMD/Nvidia/Intel) module that is 'plugged' into that frontend. There is a user-facing frontend (the OpenGL framework), which is developer by Apple and contains common logic and routing. Apple is implementing OpenGL in a similar way as Microsoft is implementing DirectX.