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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#211

Post by kvark »

lewisinc wrote: post #140
_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…

Well, at least in the Rust ecosystem there is https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx which provides backends for Vulcan, Direct X 12, Metal and OpenGL. I'm not sure it's super relevant outside of the Rust ecosystem right now, but it's worth spreading the word around of such solutions.

https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability may be relevant out side of Rust, since it's a linkable C library.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#212

Post by lev99 »

wolfgke wrote: post #158
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…

> Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes. My personal impression is that while pre-built PCs are mostly sold to businesses, there is a strong growing trend since a few years to build your own PC from parts. I really do observe that if mobility is not an issue, people now tend to move away from laptops towards self-built PCs (or often rather: let a good friend…

Is building your own PC really a recent trend?

A lot of early pcs were kits people built, and I remember pc gaming in the '90s and '00s was also heavily focused on custom built machines.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#213

Post by exelius »

wolfgke wrote: post #158
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…

> Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes. My personal impression is that while pre-built PCs are mostly sold to businesses, there is a strong growing trend since a few years to build your own PC from parts. I really do observe that if mobility is not an issue, people now tend to move away from laptops towards self-built PCs (or often rather: let a good friend…

The “enthusiast” segment of the market is small. Even then you don’t have nearly the choice in vendors you used to, so people mix and match parts from the same 5 or 6 vendors who’ve been there forever.

Cryptocurrency mining has kept the enthusiast hardware market afloat, I have a feeling...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#214

Post by ianlevesque »

RobLach wrote: post #111
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.

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.

Sounds like this might be the incentive Unity needs to fix their Metal implementation.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#215

Post by SomeHacker44 »

013a wrote: post #84
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.

It seems like a clear signal that Apple is preparing to develop its own GPUs. They're already doing this on the iPhones.

This is the most obvious explanation I have read on HN... After I read it!

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#216

Post by drb91 »

lambda wrote: post #208
drb91 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can kind of understand iOS, but it’s not like there’s a thriving graphical computing market worth locking in on the mac side. All major titles already use game engines. They’d just be locking out smaller developers who can’t invest in porting all their shaders: it’s not gonna be worth the effort. Granted, this may also be true for OpenGL.

But iOS is a lot bigger than macOS. You notice that Apple supported OpenGL while they were making most of their money from desktop and laptop sales; but once iOS became so profitable, they decided to go their own way and start pushing Metal. Lock in, or at least getting people to do more iOS first development (helped by lower profits on app store sales on Android, Android fragmentation, etc), helps Apple out a lot. Y…

So why lock in macOS at all?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#217

Post by _bxg1 »

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.

True. This is the only sane reasoning they could've had.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#218

Post by _bxg1 »

opencl wrote: post #97
_bxg1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the point of Vulkan is not having to rewrite your entire graphics stack for every OS you want to target.

That's the point of OpenGL; to my understanding, Vulkan is a modernized, lower-level spiritual successor to OpenGL.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#219

Post by mehrdada »

Figs wrote: post #171
mehrdada wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boycott Apple... and then what? What's the viable alternative? Android? No, thank you. At least you have some leverage over Apple by the virtue of being the customer. The competitor's business model makes it much harder to influence, which is hostile to the customer and their privacy. If you think Android is really open, think again. Without Google Play Services and Play Store you are basically hosed.

There's a lot of options. Easiest is just don't upgrade -- stick with your old phone as long as you can, and don't buy any more apps. If you need to replace your phone and don't want to use standard Android, you can use an Android fork that doesn't depend on Google. (I've been hearing good things about LineageOS, but haven't tried it personally.) Alternatively, you could try a less popular mobile OS like Tizen. Anoth…

Fair points. I don't think they are going to effective though for an average enough user to change Apple, and that just addresses the customer angle. As a developer you don't have much choice to boycott Apple.

You have to pick your battles in life. There are a huge number of companies I have chosen not to do business with and a long list that I'd boycott before Apple. I admire you if this is the cause you want to spend your life fighting for like I admire RMS but if that's the case one should really consider spending their energy ensuring a viable good alternative exists, and maybe lobby for regulations. Merely shouting 'boycott' in a niche community will not change Apple's behavior I don't think. This of course is not a discouragement to try, but a personal opinion on practically of achieving the desirable outcome. Especially so when the competition is much much more anticonsumer in a myriad of ways.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#220

Post by waynecochran »

mbell wrote: post #189
outworlder wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think that Apple refuses to allow GPU vendors to provide an OpenGL implementation? Because it is a fact that Apple develops their own drivers. Also, when did you last download a driver update from NVidia for your Mac? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-... Article is about Vulkan, but briefly mention Apple's own outdated OpenGL stack. http://renderingpipeline.com/2012/04/sad-…

> Also, when did you last download a driver update from NVidia for your Mac? Last week. Nvidia releases drivers for cards that the drivers which ship with macos don't support. I would also guess that the nvidia drivers which ship with macos are written by nvidia under some agreement with apple, same is likely true of AMD and intel.

Yes, but you need to switch to an older version of of Xcode/ developers tools if you want to program CUDA on a Mac. Specifically I have to switch back to last Decembers release when I want to do any CUDA development on my 2015 MacBook (I don't think there is any later Mac's that even support nVidia).
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