New Vulkan Rendering Backend and Mac Client

For a long time the client could only draw the scene through OpenGL, and that shut us out of an entire platform. Now a second engine runs under the game — Vulkan — and with it comes the first road to Mac.

macOS only supports an older OpenGL version than our renderer needs, so the game simply would not run on a Mac. Vulkan removes that wall: the same image engine, on an API that lives happily on macOS.

One detail matters here: both backends share the same shaders. That means the picture on screen is identical — only what draws it under the hood changes.

We recorded an OpenGL and a Vulkan run side by side. An honest caveat up front: the scene is non-deterministic, so after a few seconds of simulation the two runs drift apart — we cannot make them frame-for-frame identical yet. That is why each side carries an overlay: what is in the scene right now, how much of everything, and how many milliseconds each part of the frame costs. Pause it, and you can fairly compare how loaded each scene is at a comparable moment.

By feel and by the numbers: in a dynamic scene Vulkan runs almost level with OpenGL, and in the static benchmark it is a little behind — that same ~1%. That is the last gap still left to work on.

Choosing the rendering backend now lives right in the launcher — three options: Auto, OpenGL, and Vulkan. It defaults to Auto, which picks the right backend per platform: Vulkan on macOS, OpenGL on Windows and Linux. Want to experiment — choose one by hand.

On a Mac, Vulkan is the only working option: macOS caps OpenGL at an older version than the game needs. If you force OpenGL on a Mac anyway, the game won't crash silently — it shows a clear message telling you to switch to Vulkan in the launcher settings.

The backend is early, so treat it as a preview — rough edges are possible.

We verified the Mac launch automatically on both architectures — Intel (x64) and Apple Silicon (arm64). But real machines out in the wild vary far more than test runners, so Mac bugs are entirely possible. If you play on a Mac and something breaks, tell us on Discord or contact support — right now that is the best way to help us stabilize it.

Vulkan becomes the default on Windows and Linux too once we close the remaining gap on static scenes. The direction is clear, so this is tuning rather than a rewrite. And for Mac players the main thing has already happened: the game runs, and you can jump in.

Try it on Mac (preview): Download the launcher