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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#51

Post by endorphone »

_bxg1 wrote: post #32

Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area. I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work…

"But by no means to they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else"

To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#52

Post by chabsf »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #42

While this is startling, it seems pretty consistent with Apple's modus operandi in a lot of areas -- leap forward to where they think the industry is going and hope they're right. OpenGL is effectively being deprecated by its own developers in favor of Vulkan, which has an open source implementation for macOS and iOS, developed in part by Valve, built on top of Metal: https://store.steampowered.com/news/37575/ If gam…

OpenGL is "learnable" by someone in the process of learning. Vulkan and Metal are much less approachable. This will put a huge damper on low-level graphics programming as a hobby.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#54

Post by dgellow »

Unknoob wrote: post #31

Aren't most of the games on MacOS running on OpenGL? This is going to kill all the older titles that are not maintained anymore. Terrible move just to push Metal down people throats. As if MacOS gaming wasn't dead enough.

That’s a really worrying point, yes. Mac users can say goodbye to the majority of our steam library.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#55

Post by Sephr »

_bxg1 wrote: post #32

Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area. I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work…

Fortunately you can still use Vulkan on iOS and Mac OS through MoltenVK[1], a Vulkan implemention in Metal.

[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#56

Post by amag »

coldtea wrote: post #48
fabian2k wrote: post #28

OpenGL isn't pretty, but it's at least cross-platform. And my impression was that OpenGL support is mostly handled by the GPU manufacturers, so I'm not sure how much Apple gains here by deprecating OpenGL. Requiring developers to use an API locked to a particular platform feels pretty hostile to me. Doesn't matter if that API isn't perfect, or even far from it.

> Requiring developers to use an API locked to a particular platform feels pretty hostile to me. So like DirectX?

OpenGL is still an option on Windows, it's not deprecated.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#57

Post by xellisx »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #14
Analemma_ wrote: post #9

All things considered, I think there are some companies that are worse to the FOSS community than Apple, but I can't think of one that has Apple's degree of baldfaced cynicism to exploiting FOSS and open standards only to the degree that it benefits Apple, and then throwing them under the bus the instant they're no longer useful. Apple loved HTML5 when they had to kill Flash and get web developers to support mobile,…

> I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside. Well, to be honest, Apple has always been quite consistent here. They created their own ecosystem and made interoperability with other systems as difficult as possible, at software and hardware level. So t…

Didnt Apple steal all the code from one FOSS BSDs, closed sourced it and call it a day?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#58

Post by mikenew »

coldtea wrote: post #44
_bxg1 wrote: post #32

Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area. I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work…

> All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space. In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.

And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#59

Post by aseipp »

mtgx wrote: post #6
shurcooL wrote: post #2

I would be a lot more okay with this if Apple supported Vulkan, the more portable comparable API, rather than just the macOS/iOS-only Metal. I also wonder what means for WebGL and its future. Right now, WebGL works in browsers on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, which is incredible. There is no equivalent. Sure, Apple has started working on WebGPU, but that’s not yet ready nor is it guaranteed to gain Linux, Wind…

WebGPU would gain traction if it was based on Vulkan. But it's not. However, Mozilla's Obsidian API is: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/tree/mas... Apple has so little to gain over Vulkan by developing its own API but so much to lose by not adopting Vulkan (gaming companies may actually prefer developing games on the cross-platform Vulkan to target macOS/iOS devices, too, at the same time, instead…

Obsidian didn't manage to materialize a Khronos working group, so it's not moving forward. Apple instead went with the W3C to form the GPUWeb group, based on their work on WebGPU. The Obsidian folks at Mozilla have decided to follow this path instead, see here:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/pull/11#...

However, there's no real writeup of what the API will end up remotely looking like right now, so it's too early to speculate. WebGPU's original prototype used Metal's shading language for instance (since the prototype came from WebKit), but any real standard probably will probably change things up.

I believe the webgpu-servo folks have, in the mean time, begun working on lower level components/libraries to target Vulkan/DX12/Metal, for use by systems like WebGPU. Sort of like ANGLE by the Chrome team, but for newer GFX APIs.

TL;DR absolutely nothing is fleshed out at all yet and it seems plenty will probably change

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