Re: I fear that too much shiny is taking a toll on some people's attention span.
I was refuting that shared buffers are not something you can do with OpenGL. Though I neglected to include one important caveat: in Metal you can share texture storage and even compel the GPU to use linear ordering to avoid swizzling costs, if you know that that's the correct trade-off for you. I do not believe you can do this in OpenGL.
Your theory about Apple is trivial to discount, however:
The first meeting ever to discuss Vulkan happened in July 2014, and the call to form a working group happened in August. Metal was first released in June 2014.
So it is trivially false that "Apple stayed in the working group just long enough to steal most of the ideas ATI had put forward" — there was no Vulkan working group until after Metal had launched and Apple was never a member. For that reason one can also immediately discount the claim that "Metal is different to Vulkan for the sake of it".
Metal takes AMD's ideas from Mantle and adapts them to something that works across AMD, Intel and Apple's homespun GPUs. Wishing that Apple wouldn't be so quick to go it alone and so reticent to adopt a later standard is valid, alleging a weird conspiracy doesn't really stand up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
