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Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web (appleinsider.com) 170

Posted by msmash from the for-tomorrow dept.
Mikey Campbell, writing for AppleInsider: Apple's WebKit team on Tuesday proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that will focus on developing a new standard API, perhaps based on Metal, for accelerating GPU-based 3D graphics and general computation for the web. Announced through Apple's WebKit blog, the new 'GPU for the Web' Community Group will discuss a potential next-generation web graphics API that can better leverage modern GPUs. Along with 3D content, Apple proposes GPU architecture might also be used to accelerate general web computations. As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard. Unfortunately, the new graphics APIs contain nuanced architectural differences and are not available across all platforms, making them unsuitable for wide implementation on the web.
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Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web More

Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web

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  • Vulkan (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gibgezr ( 2025238 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @11:57AM (#53826701)

    The whole point of Vulkan is that it is a modern, high-performance, platform-agnostic API. Isn't that what they should use? It's already positioned as all that, it just needs the web folks to adopt it.

    • Re:Vulkan (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @12:01PM (#53826755) Journal
      But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

      • Ummm... buy out MS?

        • Apple has enough cash and equivalents on-hand in the US to buy about 4% of Microsoft. Hardly enough to buy them... Yes, Apple has about $18 billion in cash and equivalents on-hand; it has close to $200 billion in overseas funds and long-term investments, but those would be subject to a 40% tax load if repatriated/converted to buy Microsoft, meaning it would have - at most - $140 billion to use. And that would buy about 30% of Microsoft (which is close to $500 billion in value - not too far behind Apple's

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by amiga3D ( 567632 )

            Maybe Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney could all team up and absorb it.

          • The best they could hope for would be some kind of equitable merger... and then $diety help us.

            Speaking of, what the hell is with Apple fans throwing around APPLE COULD BUY YOO at everything?
            Even if Apple did have the resources on hand to purchase the entire market capitalization of Microsoft, what the hell makes anyone think the MS shareholders would jump at the opportunity of a one-time-buyout of their ownership of one of the largest tech companies in existence?
        • In their wildest dreams

      • But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

        Considering the history of Apple open source contributions in things like OpenGL, I'd say your concerns are at best not really likely. Also Apple is proposing a new standard which means it will be a standard unlike MS and the embrace and extend philosophy.

        • But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

          Considering the history of Apple open source contributions in things like OpenGL, I'd say your concerns are at best not really likely. Also Apple is proposing a new standard which means it will be a standard unlike MS and the embrace and extend philosophy.

          Exactly. Apple has a pretty good track record of leaving things Open. Take CUPS for example.

        • Considering the history of Apple open source contributions in things like OpenGL, I'd say your concerns are at best not really likely.

          Apple may have made many open source contributions to OpenGL over the years but they've never bothered implementing anything better than OpenGL 4.1 on their own systems, even though the same graphics chips they use have OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 implementations on other platforms.

          IMO their OpenGL implementations also seem quite flakey, e.g.: half the time VirtualBox guests only draw

          • Apple may have made many open source contributions to OpenGL over the years but they've never bothered implementing anything better than OpenGL 4.1 on their own systems, even though the same graphics chips they use have OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 implementations on other platforms.

            True Apple hasn't kept up with OpenGL as much as some people would have liked; however, is there are a technical reason (like going with their own platform) behind the lack of support? Considering that Apple contributed to OpenGL since 1.0, I would say it's not because of a philosophical aversion to it but maybe technical and practical concerns.

      • It looks like Rambus all over again. Proprietary components should not be part of standards, period.

        • Please elaborate on what you mean by "proprietary". Metal is competing with Vulkan and Direct3D as the successor to OpenGL. Apple wants the next version to be based on their work on Metal. Such version will undoubtedly be open source unlike Direct3D and WebGPU will is proposed to replace OpenGL.

          To help get things started, Apple's WebKit team is proposing an initial API dubbed "WebGPU." Apple began testing next-generation APIs in WebKit "a few years ago" and found encouraging results, so the company is sharing its WebGPU prototype with the the W3C Community Group.

          • Metal is competing with Vulkan and Direct3D as the successor to OpenGL.

            Absolute rubbish. Direct3D is Microsoft's attempt to exterminate OpenGL, not succeed it. Metal is Apple's attempt to undermine Vulkan, for no good technical reason. Both are fighting a losing position, sorry about your narrative.

            • Absolute rubbish. Direct3D is Microsoft's attempt to exterminate OpenGL, not succeed it. Metal is Apple's attempt to undermine Vulkan, for no good technical reason. Both are fighting a losing position, sorry about your narrative.

              Between MS and Apple which company has advanced open source more. You think that because Apple doesn't want to use Vulkan that must mean they have no good technical reason. Look at what Apple did with Clang/LLVM. gcc is a good compiler but Apple could not get the optimization they wanted from the gcc moderators. So they backed Clang/LLVM instead. Now there are two decent open source compilers you could use. If you want to plug your laptop into a dock in the future, it looks like the way to do it is not with

              • You think that because Apple doesn't want to use Vulkan that must mean they have no good technical reason.

                Thanks for telling me what I think, it makes you sound very "Apple". No. I said that Apple has no good technical reason for undermining Vulkan. Would you please refrain from twisting my words, or should I just accept that you are too "Apple" to care about that.

                • Thanks for telling me what I think, it makes you sound very "Apple". No. I said that Apple has no good technical reason for undermining Vulkan.

                  And how would you know that? Do you work for Apple? The problem you have is that you have the burden of proving Apple has "no good technical reason." This is my understanding of the problem: Metal released with iOS 8 [wikipedia.org] in September 2014. Later it was added to macOS El Capitan. Vulkan's [wikipedia.org] initial release is Feb 2016. Somehow I think time travel is beyond Apple's capabilities especially since PowerVR didn't support Vulkan until March 2016 (which Apple uses for their mobile GPU). So the most basic technical reaso

      • A good start would be for them to name the API after something other than an every-day noun commonly used to describe servers. Unless their whole drive is to define a term with itself and further confuse people.

        "Our Metal(*patent pending) API brings you closer to metal. Our API is better in every way. The whole industry is using Metal to drive metal!"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          A better start would be to change the name entirely because MeTaL for graphics already existed (and is still in use in one of my OLD machines just to demonstrate what a failure it was.) S3 anyone?

      • But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard

        Yeah, it's a real shame how they used their stranglehold over WebKit to control the direction Chrome is going; LLVM and related technologies (e.g. Clang) to control the direction a huge chunk of the software industry is going; CUPS to control the printer industry...

        A real shame.

        Not to mention all of the other projects and code they contribute [apple.com] to the open source community.

        I agree that Apple does do a lot of proprietary stuff (e.g. connectors, protocols, etc.), but they're used as a means for tying people to

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Millions of college students in dorm rooms got the RIAA to give up on DRM for music.

          Jobs rode along for the credit.

          • Jobs rode along for the credit.

            From the beginning iPods played DRM free music. The problem was that they could not sell music DRM free from the iTunes store at the insistence of the music companies. Ironically, the music companies in their short-sightedness made Apple's position stronger. In the beginning, the music company thinking was Apple was a small player and surely the PlaysForSure architecture would overtake FairPlay with its larger number of hardware options and outlets. In actuality, the issue was PlaysForSure wasn't as reliabl

            • Also, Jobs took up the suggestion he had made to Skully and started selling sugar water to kids, by putting labels for 'free itunes songs' on the bottlecaps of popular brands of soda.

              The irony was missed by many.

    • Re:Vulkan (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kbonin ( 58917 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @12:06PM (#53826807)

      Apple was a member of Vulkan and those of us who code to GPUs were excited to have a unified target finally coming into view - until Apple withdrew and announced a proprietary alternative. They shouldn't be allowed to influence the standard now.

      • Apple was a member of Vulkan and those of us who code to GPUs were excited to have a unified target finally coming into view - until Apple withdrew and announced a proprietary alternative. They shouldn't be allowed to influence the standard now.

        They're not "influencing" Vulkan. They are offering their own standard. Just like whenever something gets forked.

      • Is anybody else getting sick of this crap?

        Company A joins a standards body to try to unify the solution to some problem. That solution gets near, and Company A leaves, then proposes a new standard for everybody, further fragmenting the solution.

        I'm all for innovation and standardization, though I much prefer the approach like X windows. "Hey, this is getting old and crusty, we need some answers folks" then a few groups come up with ideas, and gradually we get to a consensus (looking like Wayland). Thi

        • You're absolutely right. What we need is a unified view, followed by everyone.

          I don't have the technical details for all the platforms, APIs and such, but I already got a few names:
          - BorgOS
          - BorgHTML
          - BorgCSS
          - BorgGPU
          - BorgAudio
          - BorgStreaming

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e r ( 2847683 )
          Here's a solution to the problem:
          1. Do not buy non-free operating systems or software. Instead use Linux or BSD or even GNU Hurd (I recommend Linux).

          2. Do not write code for non-free operating systems or software. Instead write code using widely supported standards (i.e. Vulkan) that runs on all platforms (especially freedom-supporting platforms like Linux or BSD). In this case do not ever write code using Metal for any reason under any circumstances. Apple will come around and support Vulkan once they r

        • Company A joins a standards body to try to unify the solution to some problem. That solution gets near, and Company A leaves, then proposes a new standard for everybody, further fragmenting the solution.

          That isn't the problem in this case. Apple initially joined the Vulkan group in 2014 when it was announced; however by 2015, they had left the group. The Vulkan spec wasn't released until a year later. I would guess that the Vulkan group moved too slowly for Apple.

    • Unfortunately, the new graphics APIs contain nuanced architectural differences and are not available across all platforms, making them unsuitable for wide implementation on the web.

      You must have missed that part.

    • Re:Vulkan (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @01:22PM (#53827469)

      Everyone in the comments suggesting we should just use their favorite graphics API is missing the point entirely.

      Neither Vulkan nor its competitors are safe to use with untrusted code from the web. Allowing any random web developer to have access to the full capabilities of any of those APIs is a recipe for disaster. This standard is, from what I can gather, intended to be a layer that abstracts away the underlying API, whether it be Metal, Vulkan, or Direct 3D 12, which should provide a safe means for using them.

      For an initial implementation, Apple is providing a prototype that is compatible with Metal, given that they had apparently already done quite a bit of work mapping Metal to Javascript, but it's clear that the end goal with this standard is to provide something that is compatible with all of these close-to-the-metal APIs. I imagine that version 1 of the standard will resemble an intersection of features between the competing APIs, that way they can ensure the broadest compatibility right from the get-go.

      In addition to but separate from the web standard, they're talking about taking Metal cross-platform. That wouldn't affect the web standard (which, again, should be able to work on top of any of these competing APIs), but it would ensure that the standard is usable on any platform they choose to support with Metal. If they do take Metal cross-platform, that would seem to suggest an uptick in their interest in creating web-based products that are consistent and in top-shape across a variety of platforms, in much the same way that Google created Chrome to do the same.

      • I do not understand the need to try and shove remotely hosted applications into a web browser. WTF people? Do you try to make horses fly or do you just say horses are completely unsuitable for air travel and create a jetliner?

        People. Are. Insane.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      The point of Metal, Vulkan and DX12 is that they give a fairly low-level abstraction to the graphics hardware.
      No web site should have low-level access to the user's system in any way. That is the big fallacy here.

      As to platforms, all Apple iPhones and iPads have come with PowerVR GPUs. PowerVR was an early adopter of Vulkan and one of, if not the first to demo it.
      For Apple to adopt Vulkan should not be too difficult for them. Apple only does not want to because they are too invested in Metal.

  • that you have so many to choose from.

  • Headline doesn't really match actual news (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @12:19PM (#53826947)

    Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:

    As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard.

    The only thing special about Metal that's mentioned in the article is its role in the initial implementation. To pull the relevant quote:

    While Metal appears to underpin Apple's initial web graphics proposal, the company does not expect its concept to become the ultimate standard. That said, it appears Apple is angling to take Metal cross-platform.

    "We don't expect this to become the actual API that ends up in the standard, and maybe not even the one that the Community Group decides to start with, but we think there is a lot of value in working code," Jackson says.

    So, basically, Apple folks have access to Metal and understand how it works, so they're starting with what they know and have so that they can get the ball rolling quickly. Where it goes from there is up to the community, which, given Apple's typical approach their open source/community-driven projects (e.g. WebKit, LLVM, Clang, Swift, etc.), it's likely that they actually mean that. Of course, they'll no doubt use their role in the community to try and steer things to their own advantage, but if they do so too much it's likely that this will simply become another dead-end "standard" that no one adopts.

    • Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:

      No way is Apple making this power play.

      If they did then they'd take 3d graphics hardware more seriously. As it is Apples graphics offerings are a joke, both literally and figuratively.

      • If they did then they'd take 3d graphics hardware [on desktops] more seriously. As it is Apples graphics offerings are a joke [to me], both literally and figuratively.

        I think a problem here is everyone is only thinking about the PC. 3D and web content acceleration is something that affects mobile as well. Apple is looking for something that works for both their mobile GPUs as well as desktop ones. Currently Vulkan is an option however it is relatively new.

      • Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:

        No way is Apple making this power play.

        If they did then they'd take 3d graphics hardware more seriously. As it is Apples graphics offerings are a joke, both literally and figuratively.

        Then why do you sound so nervous?

        • Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:

          No way is Apple making this power play.

          If they did then they'd take 3d graphics hardware more seriously. As it is Apples graphics offerings are a joke, both literally and figuratively.

          Then why do you sound so nervous?

          Because I know that my non-adoring comments on Apple products are going to be modded into oblivion.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geek ( 5680 )

        Apple has the best graphics on mobile by a wide margin. The desktop no but on mobile they are killing it.

        • Apple does not have any "graphics" on mobile. They license the best design for their specific needs and then build it into their CPU core. No reason why others can not do the same - they just have to be willing to pay for it. So Apple does have killer graphics with their iDevices - but it is not their design. I do give them credit for making excellent engineering decisions because licensing the design has worked out quite well for them.

  • 927 (Score:3)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @01:28PM (#53827525)
    How was this [xkcd.com] not the first post? And just so we don't ruin a perfectly good law...NAZIS
  • Now if they made decent Macbooks ago, and stopped rubbing as blind in Europe asking for more 600 USD than the equivalente machine in the US...
  • I'm all for making the web browser more powerful platforms since that can help us be more independent of any concrete OS but I can't understand why Apple does something like this. I mean, they're one of the companies more intently trying to lock everyone in to their platforms. How does this "open" initiative fit with that?

    • I'm all for making the web browser more powerful platforms since that can help us be more independent of any concrete OS but I can't understand why Apple does something like this. I mean, they're one of the companies more intently trying to lock everyone in to their platforms. How does this "open" initiative fit with that?

      Apple uses lots of open source software. They've championed lots of open source software. This would be no different. One possible advantage is that with everyone using this new standard, Apple isn't locked to a GPU on any platform. Also for them, programming is more simplified Currently they use PowerVR for their mobile and Intel/AMD/NVidia for computers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Think of it as the days of Microsoft Chrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      Apple now thinks a fast 3d layer for their content will be useful. Just like Microsoft wanted in the mid to late 1990's.
      A fast 3d Web was always a hardware and software dream to different OS teams. A feeling by OS creators that only their OS could bring a gpu and 3d web GUI code together for users and content creators.
      That browser developers needed help to fully use all the gpu or cpu with a gpu on modern computers. Only t

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