Month: February 2018

No, not that Vulcan (note, that's spelled with a "c"). This one.

Vulkan—the open, cross-platform GPU API from the Khronos Group, the industry body that also develops OpenGL—is available on Windows, Linux, Android, the Nintendo Switch, and cloud systems, but it has one sizeable gap: none of Apple's platforms support it. macOS has old, and slow, OpenGL drivers, and iOS supports OpenGL ES, the OpenGL subset designed for embedded systems. Apple has thus far shown no interest in offering the modern Vulkan API and instead has pushed its own proprietary API, Metal.

Today, that gap is being substantially filled, with the open source, royalty-free release of MoltenVK—a runtime for macOS and iOS that offers an almost complete subset of the Vulkan API implemented using Metal. Released under the Apache 2 license, MoltenVK will enable developers to build their Vulkan applications for Apple's platforms, allowing for a single codebase to span Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and more.

Dota 2 using Vulkan-on-Metal, compared to Dota 2 on Apple's OpenGL drivers. (credit: Khronos Group)

Valve is an early adopter of MoltenVK. The company has been testing MoltenVK for the macOS version of Dota 2, and indications are extremely promising: the Vulkan-on-Metal version of the game has frame rates as much as 50 percent higher than the version using Apple's OpenGL stack. Apple's OpenGL drivers have long been criticized, both for their poor performance and for Apple's refusal to support the latest versions of the specification. The Dota 2 experience suggests that developers can reap big dividends by bypassing them.

Enlarge / The below article explains how this shot looks even better with the benefits of 4K resolution and HDR color/luminance data. (This image lacks both of those boosts.) (credit: Disney-Pixar)

What's the point of ponying up for a new 4K HDR TV if you don't have an ultimate "check this out" video to match? Once you research the format, learn about confusing standards, and pick a dreamy new set, it's hard not to then invite friends to see the fruits of your nerd labor.

The trouble is, so much compatible content is either attached to video games (which aren't always fun for friends to watch you play) or films that were mastered at sub-4K resolutions. I was happy to see Planet Earth II show up in 2017 on the 4K HDR Blu-ray format, but even that series has its limitations (including some sub-4K content).

Which is why I am pleased to declare that the format has reached a tipping point. Disney-Pixar's 2017 film Coco launches in stores this week as a 4K HDR Blu-ray, and while it's not the first CGI-animated film in the format, it's easily the most impressive thus far. More importantly, it demonstrates exactly what pricey-TV owners can expect when a film is produced with 4K-and-above material across its entire pipeline.

Star-forming region near the center of the Milky Way. Composite image, assembled from infrared images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 2009. (credit: NASA & ESA)

How did life start? There may not be a bigger question. To learn the secret of our origins means going back beyond the earliest forms of biological life, past simple bacteria, and down to the chemistry of the building blocks that came earlier.

Most people have heard DNA’s double helix described as the blueprint for life, but its single-stranded relative RNA is also critical for transmitting genetic information. Both are present in the cells of all living organisms, and many scientists suspect that RNA was the original genetic material, coming on the scene before DNA, more than four billion years ago during a period scientists call “RNA world.”

But to build the RNA world, RNA and other biomolecules had to come together in the first place. Their constituent parts have a distinctive chemical property called chirality that’s related to how their atoms are arranged. And a debate has broken out about how life’s chirality got started: is it the product of the chemical environment of the early Earth, or did life inherit its chirality from space?