Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop join forces with Khronos to release open source SDKs and runtime libraries that will enable Vulkan applications to be ported to Apple's macOS and iOS platforms.

Valve is extending Dota 2 using the Vulkan tools on macOS to achieve higher performance than native OpenGL drivers. Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS will be released in the coming months as a free update.

The Khronos Vulkan Portability Initiative continues to refine and define a universally portable subset of Vulkan 1.0 that can be run at native performance levels over Metal and DirectX 12 drivers. Released into open source today is the MoltenVK library from The Brenwill Workshop, which translates calls within the Vulkan portable subset to underlying Metal calls on macOS and iOS. MoltenVK uses the open source SPIRV-Cross cross-compiler to translate Vulkan shaders into underlying native code formats. MoltenVK is being made freely available for all developers, with no fees or royalties needed to ship commercial applications.

Also available today is the open source LunarG Vulkan SDK for macOS on LunarXchange, which enables developers to build, run, and debug their Vulkan applications on the Apple Mac platform. The LunarG SDK for macOS provides loader and validation layers, which allows programmers to check their code for correct API usage. LunarG will continue to evolve the macOS SDK to add additional tools and features.