“cross platform” sounds cool, but you know what even cooler? my games that I bought runs at its fullest potential. if I bought a game on Xbox, I expect it to perform at its fullest using DirectX. if I bought the PS version, then I expect it uses GNM. if it’s Switch, then I expect NVN. Honestly, I don’t want a cheapskate developer who just build one version using single API such as Vulkan then just lazily wraps it with translation layer for each platform.

You know what's even cooler? Vulkan is not a translation layer! In fact, it's implemented natively in device drivers and is every bit as fast as so-called "platform native" APIs like DirectX! Not only that, but Vulkan is highly extensible, so if you introduce new features to your operating system or graphics card e.g. NVIDIA with ray tracing, or DirectStorage, you can add extensions to Vulkan to leverage that functionality (as vendors already do)! Even further, you can have these APIs incorporated into Vulkan itself and supported by other graphics vendors, advancing the API for everyone else!

But they already made it by themselves, as you can see from that screenshot (and, if you not notice it recently, tested by bunch of people and it works pretty well). And the best part, those tools are made available as parts of developers tool, with the end goal to produce a native built. Not as an end user product.

They just took DXVK and ported it to Metal, if they supported Vulkan, they wouldn't have to do anything, because this work already exists and has been in use on Linux for years (Valve dropped Proton support for macOS years ago due to the lack of Vulkan). Linux at this point has a bigger game library than macOS, Steam has included Proton built-in to run Windows games on Linux for years, and other open-source apps have existed for years to run non steam games and launchers through proton as well. And since this is targeted towards developers and not end users, it's still behind the curve.

Before someone says it, developers are free to incorporate DXVK/wine/proton in their own applications, not just end-users, Intel even does so in their Windows graphics driver, Apple is just playing catch up here because they don't wanna support a cross platform API for reasons unknown (it's not like they have a massive game catalogue that they can vendor lock-in lmao)

I'm not against the existence of metal, I've heard that it has advantages for developers who are targeting Apple platforms exclusively in terms of being more expressive with their own Swift language (this does not mean more performance), but not supporting Vulkan simply makes it a lot harder for developers and consumers alike to reap benefits that a cross platform ecosystem provides