KosmicKrisp Now Conformant To Vulkan 1.4, Improving Performance Against Apple's Metal

KosmicKrisp is the effort led by LunarG for developing a modern Vulkan-on-Metal driver for Apple systems within Mesa. This modern alternative to MoltenVK continues progressing well and now enjoys Vulkan 1.4 conformance and its performance continues inching closer to that of the native Apple Metal API. Aitor Camacho Larrondo of LunarG presented at XDC2026 Toronto this week around KosmicKrisp and its latest developments, which most notably is KosmicKrisp passing the Vulkan 1.4 CTS and being deemed a conformant implementation by The Khronos Group. KosmicKrisp is considered by LunarG to be production ready on modern macOS and using the Apple Silicon hardware for Vulkan API support atop Metal. Excitingly, its performance is in good shape to the alternative MoltenVK Vulkan-on-Metal implementation and not too far behind native Metal performance. LunarG is continuing to invest in enhancing the KosmicKrisp performance as well as weeding out remaining bugs. Other Vulkan features are expected to be implemented as well as enhancing the tooling support around this Vulkan API implementation for Macs. KosmicKrisp to date has also only been focused on macOS and not iOS. More resources are needed before KosmicKrisp on iOS could really become a reality. Those interested can learn more about the 2026 state of KosmicKrisp via the XDC presentation embedded above as well as the slides.