 | |
| Developer(s) | The Brenwill Workshop Ltd.,Khronos Group |
|---|---|
| Initial release | February 26, 2018; 7 years ago (2018-02-26)[1] |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | github |
| Written in | Objective-C++,Objective-C,C++,C[3] |
| Operating system | macOS,iOS,tvOS |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Wrapper library[3] |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Website | moltengl |
MoltenVK is asoftware library which allowsVulkan applications to run on top ofMetal onApple'smacOS,iOS, andtvOSoperating systems. It is the firstsoftware component to be released for the Vulkan Portability Initiative, a project to have a subset of Vulkan run on platforms lackingnative Vulkan drivers.
There are some limitations compared with a native Vulkan implementation.[4]
MoltenVK was first released as aproprietary and commercially licensed product by The Brenwill Workshop on July 27, 2016.[5]
On July 31, 2017,Khronos announced the formation of the Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup.[6]
On February 26, 2018, Khronos announced that Vulkan became available on macOS and iOS products through the MoltenVK library.[7]Valve announced thatDota 2 will run on macOS using the Vulkan API with the aid of MoltenVK,[8] and that they had made an arrangement with developer The Brenwill Workshop Ltd to release MoltenVK asopen-source software under theApache License version 2.0.[9]
On May 30, 2018,Qt was updated with Vulkan for Qt on macOS using MoltenVK.[10] On May 31, 2018, optional Vulkan support forDota 2 on macOS was released. Benchmarks for the game were available the following day, showing better performance using Vulkan and MoltenVK compared to OpenGL.[11] On July 20, 2018,Wine was updated with Vulkan support on macOS using MoltenVK.[12] On 29 July 2018, the first app using MoltenVK was accepted onto theApp Store, after initially being rejected.[13] On 6 August 2018,Google open-sourced Filament, a crossplatformreal-timephysically based rendering engine with MoltenVK for macOS/iOS.[14] On November 28, 2018,Valve releasedArtifact, their first Vulkan-only game on macOS using MoltenVK.[15]
On 29 January 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.32 was released with early prototype of Vulkan Portability Extensions.RPCS3 andDolphin emulators were updated with Vulkan support on macOS using MoltenVK.[16] On 13 April 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.34 was released with support fortessellation. On July 30, 2019, MoltenVK 1.0.36 was released targeting Metal 3.0.[17] On July 31, 2020, MoltenVK 1.0.44 was released, adding support for thetvOS platform.[18] On January 23, 2020, MoltenVK was updated to support for some of the new features ofVulkan 1.2, as of Vulkan SDK 1.2.121.[19]
On October 1, 2020, MoltenVK 1.1.0 was released, adding full support forVulkan 1.1,[20] as of Vulkan SDK 1.2.154.[21]
On 9 December 2020, MoltenVK 1.1.1 was released, providing support for Vulkan onApple silicon GPUs and support for theMac Catalyst platform for porting iOS/iPadOS apps to macOS.[22]
On October 18, 2022, MoltenVK 1.2.0 was released, adding full support forVulkan 1.2[23] as of Vulkan SDK 1.3.231.
In January 2023, MoltenVK 1.2.2 added support for Vulkan as of SDK 1.3.239, while this version of Vulkan SDK fixed some issues with the interconnectivity with Metal API.[24]