MoltenVK Differences compared to native vulkan drivers?

What are the differences from MVK to any normal conformant 1.3 driver? Are those differences significant and are they limited by hardware limitations or simply the Metal API?

Jun 04 '25 01:06 vaylor27

This extensions shows you some features that aren't supported. It exists primarly because of MoltenVK. Some of those features are supported by MoltenVK nowadays thanks to Metal updates. https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/latest/man/html/VK_KHR_portability_subset.html

You can find out which features are problematic on which hardware using the Vulkan capability database. Like this for example: https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/displayreport.php?id=38427#features_extensions

Jun 04 '25 02:06 K0bin

To add to that, there is also conformance testing performed from time-to-time which can indicate some of the gaps in full compatibility, usually due to either the complexity of implementing a feature correctly on Metal if at all possible, or a Metal bug: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1664

Jun 04 '25 03:06 squidbus