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fantastic! thanks for doing this—I hope it gets y’all a bunch of new players. would love to know more about what the rewrite entailed (presumably complications around TBDR and maybe scheduling?); will keep a hopeful eye out for a blog post.

It was (initially) mostly about efficiently using the API - TG used OpenGL at the start, so our binding model was a huge anti-pattern in Vulkan (and thus Metal). The new backend uses descriptor sets as a first-class feature, deduplicates state changes, and does less bookkeeping of object lifetimes.

We now also precompute 99% of pipelines to avoid shader compilation stalls since compiling shaders via MoltenVK is much slower than on PC. I've also fixed a few validation errors that newer Vulkan SDKs started detecting, and fixed a swapchain misuse when the compositor hands us images out of order.

🫠 Intel 😭