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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#121

Post by mellinoe »

nightski wrote: post #105
mellinoe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations". Actually, most game developers do that. Pretty much every game (even ones with a custom, "non-AAA" engine) will have some kind of abstraction layer for dealing with graphics API's. Writing an additional backend for Metal is not a monumental undertaking -- it's…

While that may be somewhat true (and I disagree with the tiny fraction assessment, unless you are measuring in some other metric than time investment), I feel like it would still greatly increase your QA budget. Each additional back-end that is supported now requires extensive testing through the game development process.

In my experience, trying to get OpenGL to behave the same way (and with the same performance) on a bunch of different systems is actually more work than just maintaining multiple backends. Testing OpenGL on Windows does not in any way guarantee that it's going to work on Linux, or macOS, or whatever else -- even if you don't add a crazy OpenGL extension support matrix into the mix. So your QA budget is already going to include testing OpenGL on all those platforms.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#123

Post by rock_hard »

kilon wrote: post #120

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 Bluepri…

Unreal and Unity are 3D engines, OpenGL is a API on top of the graphics card driver much like Direct3D...they are both very different things!

Unity and Unreal engines are both built on top of APIs such as OpenGL and Direct3D

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#124

Post by busterarm »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #77
dionian wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 if you use a USB-C device in the back left port on a 4-port 15", there's a good chance your MBP will fry it! Oh standards!

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#125

Post by jonhendry18 »

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.

"God forbid they'd adopt some sort of open standard "

They did, when they adopted OpenGL and OpenCL. Years ago.

Apparently they've decided that those have outlived their usefulness.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#126

Post by anaphylactic »

Brakenshire wrote: post #85
chabsf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I believe (hope) that OpenGL continues to be that developer-friendly API. Building OpenGL on top of Vulkan shouldn't be too hard, and it means we don't have to pointlessly deprecate and recreate the huge number of OpenGL resources out there.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#127

Post by Jach »

adamredwoods wrote: post #90
rbanffy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will take a couple more releases for it to stop working.

Apple releases about once a year, so two years before I am forced to switch to a PC?

At least you'll have the option with the games being part of steam. How many games are unplayable and never will be playable again on any phone that upgraded to iOS 11?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#128

Post by exelius »

jrs95 wrote: post #107
exelius wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is coasting in the desktop / laptop market. Refresh cycles are like 5-10 years on PCs now, and it’s not clear tablets even have a refresh cycle. You can’t get growth on PC hardware anymore, not even if you’re Apple. So it goes into maintenance mode. Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes. Apple is all about mobile phones, the Apple Watch and air pods…

I disagree, I think Apple is still rather committed to the Mac even if it is no longer their #1 priority. Even if it's a small part of their profits, it's a big source of the strength of their brand (visually speaking, a Mac stands out against a PC far more than an iPhone stands out against any other smartphone), and that's something that's crucial for all of their products. Bad press about the Mac damages the brand,…

Sure; but users stopped buying computer hardware on specs last decade (or at least the mass market Apple is chasing). Macs aren’t even any more expensive than top-end PC laptops. They’re just a brand choice.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#129

Post by SolarNet »

bilbo0s wrote: post #98
chuckdries wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still way faster than opengl in some senarios

Way faster in most scenarios actually. I'll give it that. (Any scenario I've tested anyway.) But it's also more difficult for the lay programmer to use as well.

Just use a vulkan implementation of opengl.

OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal

I can feel the performance gains already.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#130

Post by jonhendry18 »

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…

Autodesk Fusion 360 runs on Macs.
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