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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#251

Post by mastax »

snarfy wrote: post #114
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.

PC Gaming is about the same market size as console: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-rea...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#252

Post by corysama »

fulafel wrote: post #249
jblow wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, glVertex3f was deprecated years ago by OpenGL itself. That is not the way the API works any more. [1] Look into what it takes to write the minimum viable OpenGL program, written using non-deprecated routines, that puts a textured triangle on the screen. It sucks. On top of that, OpenGL is slow and gives you no way to create programs with smooth performance -- for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behi…

The non-deprecated OpenGL code for a hello world triangle is still an order of magnitude less verbose than Vulkan though.

Vulkan code is extremely front-loaded. HelloTriangle is much longer. A complete application can be significantly shorter.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#253

Post by lotyrin »

RantyDave wrote: post #250
013a wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nah. The GPU on Intel chips is free and the eGPU thing, to me, is official notification that Apple think GPU's should be on the outside. I bet this generation of MacBook Pros are the last to have discrete graphics...

You don't get free Intel GPUs on your ARM laptop chips...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#254

Post by wlesieutre »

BurningCycles wrote: post #224
vvanders wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Indeed, I directly thought of 3d applications like Blender, Maya, etc which use OpenGL. It's a very weird move to me, even if the software in question will be kept compatible with Apple's Legacy OpenGL, these versions will be worse than their counterparts running on other platforms making use of new shiny OpenGL features. It's like Apple is saying 'we don't care' to the 3d professional market, also doesn't Photoshop…

After discontinuing AutoCAD for Mac in 1994 people begged for 18 years to get it back and now Apple says "eh, we didn't want that anyway."

I heard they have a WebAssembly/WebGL version now, betting that'll get wrapped up in a WebView and we can all pretend it's a native program still.

Speaking of WebGL, that's basically OpenGL ES 2.0, but I assume the implementation in WebKit is backed by Metal? What about other browsers like Firefox?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#255

Post by RobLach »

ianlevesque wrote: post #214
RobLach wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's much of an incentive. According to Valve's hardware surveys roughly 3% of Steam's market is MacOS. Those type of numbers are similar across different distribution platforms that a Unity game dev will target. It'll be hard to nudge it away from low priority with that share.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#256

Post by tlrobinson »

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…

Custom built PCs are a niche. The vast majority of people just want to buy a box that works.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#258

Post by abowlofpetunias »

beefsack wrote: post #257

Would it be correct to assume that swathes of old games will just stop working when 10.14 arrives? I'm not a MacOS user, but as a gamer that would frustrate the hell out of me.

"Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14."

Should be okay for now.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#259

Post by sundvor »

_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…

Apple must truly hate gaming, or suffer from a serious case of Not Invented Here with their Metal stuff. As if any serious gaming studio would target Metal which doesn't run on Windows.

In fact, they couldn't get their act together, keep with current versions, and as a result titles like Elite Dangerous were being shut down anyway. Reason: OpenGL stuck on an old version without support of compute shaders.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/424243-Importan...

https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=228

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#260

Post by iajrz »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #232
blt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Already there: https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ "MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple's Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS."

But molten is for Vulkan (ie: not OpenGL) - and not 100% of Vulkan, AFAIK.
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