Mesa's KosmicKrisp Vulkan-On-Metal Achieves MoltenVK Feature Parity

Mesa's KosmicKrisp Vulkan-On-Metal Achieves MoltenVK Feature Parity

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 15 February 2026 at 06:34 AM EST.

Last year, consulting firm LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan-on-Metal driver designed to efficiently leverage the Vulkan API on Apple macOS systems. Positioned as an alternative to the established MoltenVK project, KosmicKrisp was upstreamed for Mesa 26.0 and has continued making significant progress in expanding Vulkan capabilities within Apple's ecosystem.

KosmicKrisp delivers Vulkan 1.3 compliance on Apple devices and has seen continuous feature development from LunarG to ensure it provides an effective implementation that is comparable or superior to MoltenVK. This past week, LunarG's Aitor Camacho landed additional features into Mesa 26.1-devel, bringing the driver to feature parity with the MoltenVK codebase.

LunarG has been developing KosmicKrisp for Google as an effective Vulkan-on-Metal implementation specifically for accelerating the Google Android emulator on macOS. The recent pull request titled "kk: Few missing features and extensions for MoltenVK parity" added several critical components:

• VK_EXT_texel_buffer_alignment extension
• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 extension
• VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d extension
• Depth bias clamp functionality
• Large points support
• Push descriptor functionality

The achievement of MoltenVK parity represents a significant milestone for the KosmicKrisp project. By matching the feature set of the established MoltenVK driver, KosmicKrisp now offers developers an alternative implementation with comparable capabilities. This is particularly relevant for the Android emulator use case, where Vulkan acceleration can provide substantial performance improvements over software rendering.

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see what additional features and optimizations KosmicKrisp supports before the stable Mesa 26.1 release in mid-Q2. The driver's progress suggests it may become a viable alternative for developers and users seeking Vulkan support on macOS systems, potentially offering different performance characteristics or compatibility advantages compared to MoltenVK.

The upstreaming of KosmicKrisp into Mesa demonstrates the growing importance of Vulkan support across different platforms and the ongoing efforts to ensure the API's capabilities are accessible even on platforms with proprietary graphics APIs like Apple's Metal.