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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#71

Post by endorphone »

vvanders wrote: post #66
endorphone wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Not everything that runs on OpenGL is a video game. Tons of applications out there that just won't have the budget to do a rewrite(and even fewer were probably setup with the right architecture if they were depending on OpenGL in the first place).

True, but they didn't remove OpenGL, they simply deprecated it (e.g. don't expect any updates to it, new tooling will not be built around it, etc). That shouldn't affect legacy apps.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#72

Post by himom »

This is bad: a hobbyist will be faced with a huge burden to bring anything 3D cross-platform to their audience. In the past, it was possible to use Qt or a nasty GLU/GLUT wrapper to write portable code.

Way back in 2006, in CS175, we implemented almost all of the core 1.5 pipeline in C++. Software OpenGL implementations may not be the fastest, but they’re more or less trivial (quaternions, trapezoid-based triangle engine, painters algorithm, z-buffering, texture mapping, bump-mapping, lighting and various shading models), and therefore accelerate-able with CPU and GPGPU SIMD ops.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#73

Post by itronitron »

mikenew wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted

I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#74

Post by blt »

vvanders wrote: post #66
endorphone wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Not everything that runs on OpenGL is a video game. Tons of applications out there that just won't have the budget to do a rewrite(and even fewer were probably setup with the right architecture if they were depending on OpenGL in the first place).

If there isn't one already, I'm sure someone will implement OpenGL on top of Metal when it's needed badly enough. At least they're going closer to the hardware, not further away.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#75

Post by chipotle_coyote »

xellisx wrote: post #57
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Mac OS X is based on the closed source NextStep; in many respects, the Darwin kernel is the continuation of NextStep's kernel. A fair amount of the user space code of OS X is from FreeBSD, which to the best of my knowledge continues along merrily open source as ever. Apple actually hired one of FreeBSD's lead developers to manage their BSD technology group.

And, I mean, c'mon. The move from NextStep to Darwin moved the kernel to open source. Webkit? Open source. CUPS? Still open source. Clang and LLVM and Swift? Open source, open source, open source. Apple maintains an open source page. They put stuff on GitHub.

I get some of the hostility toward Apple here; they're not always good at playing with others, there have been complaints about the way they do (or don't) contribute to projects they benefit from. But the narrative that Apple hates everything open under all circumstance and is all about proprietary everything all the time just isn't supported by reality.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#76

Post by _bxg1 »

Sephr wrote: post #55
_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

Sure, but the whole point of both Vulkan and Metal is to bring out more performance by being lower-level. I'd assume that at least part of that benefit is lost when you use something like this.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#77

Post by tobyhinloopen »

dionian wrote: post #53
bingoboingo33 wrote: post #41

Very much in line with Apple's way of doing things. God forbid they'd adopt some sort of open standard - even though they've hugely benefited from them.

did you also complain when they adopted USB-C

Yes, when they decided to drop all other ports AND their iphones still don’t have USB-C, so you cant use iOS headphones on your mac, and you cannot charge or sync via the default cable on your mac.

Nobody has USB-C stuff everything. Every owner is using a collection of dongles and it is absolutely stupid.

The OLED bar is also stupid.

I just hope my 2015 macbook never gets obsolete because I dislike the newer ones... and yes, I owned one, and I sold t after 2 weeks and got my 2015 back

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#78

Post by badsectoracula »

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 effectively being deprecated by its own developers in favor of Vulkan

OpenGL is not deprecated, releases slowed down since there isn't really much new stuff to add, but 4.6 was released just last year after Vulkan.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#79

Post by chuckdries »

janoc wrote: post #16
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,…

Apple has a tiny market share when it comes to 3D applications - OpenGL is mostly the "pro" 3D world, be it CAD, 3D visualization, 3D simulation and similar. None of that runs on Macs, everything is Windows/Linux these days. So there will be little "forcing" into their proprietary APIs - the few 3D developers that actually tried to support Mac will kill the platform off because nobody is going to rewrite major piece…

SteamVR is actively being developed for Metal (it's in beta rn), and Khronos has released a vulkan implementation that runs on top of metal.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#80

Post by patrickg_zill »

To me this signals that the Second Moribundity of Apple is nigh.

The First Moribundity was the period in the 1990s when Apple was coasting on the DTP and Photoshop advantage over Windows they had, reducing the features of their desktops and not innovating. Schindler, a smart but ineffective leader, was replaced by Gil Amelio, a star in his prior field but unable to get Apple headed in the right direction. It took Jobs' return to right the ship that time.

The emphasis on thin but less functional and less serviceable laptops, the dropping of OpenGL, the cruft piling on top of OS X to no new net benefit for users, and their coasting on the desktop market all point to this IMHO.

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