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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#111

Post by RobLach »

endorphone wrote: post #51
_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.

Every game developer I know turns off the metal rendering pipeline and uses the much more stable and refined OpenGL one unless getting every tiny bit of performance needs to be squeezed out.

I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#112

Post by drb91 »

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?

Exactly like DirectX. Great API to use if you don't give a shit about portability. If you do, it's useless.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#113

Post by ksk »

dgellow wrote: post #40
ksk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, thats one explanation. The alternate explanation is that Apple supports mature and robust technologies because they want whats in their users' best interest. Neither OpenGL nor OpenCL in their current form are robust. Certainly, that is not to deny that Apple might have a vested interest, but its naive to think that everything is just black or white. RE: HTML5 - Apple simply made a mistake. Jobs famously said t…

OpenGL and OpenCL aren’t “robust” on macOS because Apple stopped updating their drivers after the version 4.2, which has been released circa 2011. Current version of the standard is 4.6, released July 2017.

Robustness is orthogonal to versioning. They were funding opengl dev on osx, and decided to stop. You can insert your own reasoning but I believe the more reasonable assumption here is that they were not happy with the direction the spec was going. Apple is strongly biased towards vertical integration. Owning the spec + OS + driver + hardware is the best way of achieving a high level of robustness (Whether they actually do achieve that remains to be seen).

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#114

Post by snarfy »

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.

To be fair, PC gaming is a small fraction of the overall gaming market. All the consoles have their own proprietary graphics apis. It's ok if apple's api is proprietary too. Consoles support opengl, but it's not optimal. If they all strictly adhere to standard graphics apis, how do they differentiate themselves? Why make custom silicon with their apple 'bionic' chip? It's going to need an api to go with it.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#115

Post by bgorman »

drb91 wrote: post #110
Sephr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is Apple investing in Metal at all then?

Same reason Microsoftinvests in DirectX. Lock in software developers and consumers alike.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#116

Post by chipotle_coyote »

badsectoracula wrote: post #78
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.

I know it's not an official deprecation, but it sure seems like the Khronos Group sees Vulkan as OpenGL's de facto successor.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#117

Post by drb91 »

tzahola wrote: post #106
Brakenshire wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a new more developer-friendly API built on top of Vulkan as a replacement for OpenGL.

Then you could just use one of the existing engines like Unity.

Pretty sure Unity is more heavyweight than a few hundred kilobytes of a library.

It also doesn't come installed on my machine.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#118

Post by busterarm »

janoc wrote: post #95
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sure hate it when Microsoft does it, but at least they have market share. Who wants to support Metal just to target the Mac? Plenty of big 3D/CAD/etc players? In lots of creative areas, the Mac dominates still (despite stories about people moving to Windows nobody's going anywhere, where nobody = quite few creatives overall). Besides, with Metal they'll target iOS as well, and that's a huge platform, and where mo…

CAD on Mac is pretty much non-existent, as is any professional 3D market - the market share isn't there, the hardware support is terrible, so few major players bother with supporting Macs. All this stuff is either Windows (CAD) or Linux (3D simulation, visualization) these days. And with this deprecation Mac is pretty much dead as a platform for professional 3D.

Creative Suite has run better on PC and at better price-performance ratio for almost a decade.

Graphic Designers still like Macs for the most part I guess -- and I still see them in video production a lot, but that's starting to change pretty quickly.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#120

Post by kilon »

Apple killed Flash and now they kill OpenGL. Both incredibly crappy technologies that survived for so long because of their popularity.

Nowadays Unreal Engine fill the role very well and can sit on top of any platform easily. Popularity wise , together with Unity have completely destroyed both Metal and OpenGL. Vulkan , stands no chance too. Unreal Engine is also open source and very easy to extend because of Blueprints. Unlike OpenGL , is not a C API trying to shoehorn itself into a C++ dominated world.

I have to use OpenGL 3.3 and I am amazed how badly designed it is. A brief look into Vulkan made even less sense.

I don’t agree with everything Apple does but killing Flash and OpenGL is two of my favorites. My only complain is that they have not done it as aggressively as they did with Flash. If they manage to kill JavaScript and HTML/CSS abominations I will become a hardcore Apple fan.

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