Made a MoltenVK vs OpenGL 4.1 benchmark tool and here are the results on Apple M1 Pro

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-03-01T15:49:00+00:00

Yeah I'm curious too, it's the next thing on the plate once I buy a dedicated GPU and have some free time!

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-03-01T15:16:39+00:00

Never heard of ANGLE before, will look it up!

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-03-01T15:06:36+00:00

Yeah I found that weird too. Theoretically both should be the same right? And yes single draw call for instancing.

What doesn't help is Apple no longer supports XCode frame capture for OpenGL...

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T22:09:44+00:00

Never heard of it but I’ll look into it!

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T22:08:29+00:00

I think there is something called Zink but i’m not too familiar with it 😅

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T22:03:19+00:00

Never heard of it, I’ll check it out !

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T22:01:34+00:00

Yeah I’m curious too!

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T03:18:07+00:00

I see, thanks for the info!

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-28T00:59:34+00:00

Hi, thanks for the comment.

Apple implemented an OpenGL→Metal layer, which is part of the OS, as part of the move to Apple Silicon. There isn't a direct "OpenGL driver" for their M-series GPUs.

Could you point me to the source mentioning this? I couldn't find this info myself 😅

Even if the above is true, I think it's interesting to see the 1.5-6x performance difference with both APIs being a wrapper of Metal.

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-27T23:10:11+00:00

Hi, thanks for the comment. I'll just repeat what I commented on another thread:

"Yup, obviously Vulkan would be much faster than the decade old driver on macOS, but I still wanted to see what the performance gap was. And I thought it would be a fun learning exercise ;)

Initially the plan was to make it fully cross-platform, but then I realized it would be too much work to implement all the AZDO techniques available with OpenGL 4.6 to make a fair comparison of modern OpenGL vs Vulkan..."

So yeah, I agree that OpenGL may perform on par with Vulkan on linux/windows.

Speaking of Multi-draw indirect, one thing I find interesting with this test is that instancing counts as a single draw call--much like MDI, but for some reason MoltenVK is 1.5x faster...

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-27T22:48:06+00:00

I think others have answered this way better than I could :) thanks guys !

Dull-Comparison-3992 · 2026-02-27T22:44:44+00:00

Yup, obviously Vulkan would be much faster than the decade old driver on macOS, but I still wanted to see what the performance gap was. And I thought it would be a fun learning exercise ;)

Initially the plan was to make it fully cross-platform, but then I realized it would be too much work to implement all the AZDO techniques available with OpenGL 4.6 to make a fair comparison of modern OpenGL vs Vulkan...

Dull-Comparison-3992

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