DLdlivingston·Jul 16, 2025
To correct some misconceptions for readers:
Operating systems do not implement graphics APIs for GPUs. These are created by the GPU manufacturer themselves (AMD, Nvidia, etc.). This includes DirectX drivers, both user-space and kernel-space drivers.
Graphics APIs like DirectX and Vulkan are better thought of as (1) a formal specification for GPU behavior, combined with (2) a small runtime. The actual DX/VK drivers are thin shims around a GPU manufacturer's own driver API.
For AMD, the DirectX / Vulkan / OpenGL graphics drivers share a common layer called "PAL" which AMD has open sourced: <https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal>
Apple really isn't that different here: they leave the graphics manufacturers to implement their own drivers. Unfortunately, Apple is the sole graphics manufacturer for their OS, and they've chosen to only implemen
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t Metal drivers for their GPUs (and a legacy OpenGL driver too).
It's not that big of a deal though, because Vulkan is supported on macOS through the MetalVK project, which wrap the Vulkan API around the Metal API. And projects like vkd3d wrap the DirectX 12 API around the Vulkan API, which is then wrapped around the Metal API. This is how you're able to run Windows games on Mac via the Game Porting Toolkit or CrossOver, btw.