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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#301

Post by yread »

bittcto wrote: post #276
sundvor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://for…

Hypothesis: There are more machines in consumer hands which support Metal than DirectX. This may sound crazy, but remember there are billions of iOS devices out there in the world, and I don't think X boxes plus windows game machines count in the billions. Its true Apple hasn't won the hard core gamer market, but they are no longer the niche player that had to cater to windows users.

If you're counting only gaming PCs (i.e. device used mainly for demanding 3D games) you should also count only gaming Macs/iPads/iPhones. How many are there in the world?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#302

Post by badsectoracula »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #116
badsectoracula wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure why you say that, their official stance has always been that OpenGL will continue to evolve as GPUs evolve and need to expose new functionality.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#303

Post by sgift »

piva00 wrote: post #292
kbwt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc On PC: Maybe by number of games, but not by the number of players. (I count Fortnite as an outlier because it's technically not built on a third-party engine)

So based on number of players, what is the most used engine today if not UE nor Unity? There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?

Battlefield, CoD, AC, all the sports titles, GTA. More or less everything build by one of the big three uses their own in-house engine.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#304

Post by sgift »

ctrl-j wrote: post #240
raverbashing wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Photoshop rely on OpenGL these days as well ? Yes, though with Adobe's relationship with Apple they probably got all the handholding and resources to do the port to Metal.

I'm not sure about that. Or maybe Adobe just doesn't care. My 2017 Macbook Pro has horseshit graphical bugs in both Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm exclusively doing all my graphics work on my Windows 10 machine now (even though windows and my Wacom tablet do not play nice together.)

> even though windows and my Wacom tablet do not play nice together.

They don't? Whats the matter? (mine works great, but I'm not a heavy user so curious if it depends on the model or I just didn't run into it so far)

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#305

Post by luk32 »

sgift wrote: post #303
piva00 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So based on number of players, what is the most used engine today if not UE nor Unity? There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?

Battlefield, CoD, AC, all the sports titles, GTA. More or less everything build by one of the big three uses their own in-house engine.

Err at least some Battlefield games, fifa 17 and 18 use frostbite engine. I don't think one can call it custom.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#307

Post by ethelward »

piva00 wrote: post #292
kbwt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc On PC: Maybe by number of games, but not by the number of players. (I count Fortnite as an outlier because it's technically not built on a third-party engine)

So based on number of players, what is the most used engine today if not UE nor Unity? There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?

The Witcher 3 is using RedEngine, GTA V RAGE, the Battlefields and SW:Battlefront {1,2} are using Frostbite IIRC, the two new Tomb Raider on Horizon, Rainbow 6 Siege and the Assassin's creed are on Anvil, Overwatch & SC2 have their own engines too, same for League of Legends, CoD are on a heavily customized id Engine, Minecraft is custom, Bethesda have their own engines too for Skyrim & Fallout, Path of Exile cutom too, all taken from Steam 100 most played.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#308

Post by exDM69 »

fooster wrote: post #198
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…

> for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behind your back while you are trying to have a smooth frame rate. What? I've written commercial games with opengl on osx/ios and my experience doesn't show that at all.

> What? I've written commercial games with opengl on osx/ios and my experience doesn't show that at all.

State-based recompilation is a known issue in many GL drivers, particularly on mobile. E.g. changing blending settings may cause shaders to get recompiled. This can take up to a second.

Some engines work around this by doing a dummy draw to an offscreen surface with all pipeline configurations that they use at init time. This (usually) guarantees that all the shaders are pre-compiled.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#309

Post by w-m »

adamisntdead wrote: post #11

As someone who read this with an editor full of OpenCL kernels, I think apple must really have missed the point of these sort of frameworks - heterogeneous computing. If I wanted the best possible speed, latest features ect. I would write multiple back ends in things like CUDA. I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system,…

> I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

That was the promise, but it never became reality. When writing kernels for real-world applications, OpenCL breaks down in numerous ways. The result is usually neither stable, nor portable, nor fast and a pain to work with. There was never OpenCL support for 3rd party developers on iOS.

You say you are writing OpenCL kernels on a MBP and they are portable, maybe you got lucky? Lots of comments I see on the deprecation on OpenCL seem to come from people who like the idea of having OpenCL (and its promises, which are awesome), but never had the awful experience of actually working with it.

I remember the open letter from the Blender developers on the sad state of OpenCL support on Mac (http://preta3d.com/os-x-users-unite/) from 2015. Some GPU vendors (AMD, Intel and Qualcomm) continued to put resources to better OpenCL support over the last couple years, but maybe too little, too late? It seems at least Apple had already given up on OpenCL by the time of this letter (and moved their resources completely to Metal), as nothing new has happened for OpenCL since then.

I'd prefer if we had a working OpenCL on many platforms. As we don't, especially not on Apple platforms, the step of deprecating it is regrettable, but at least honest.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#310

Post by sgift »

luk32 wrote: post #305
sgift wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battlefield, CoD, AC, all the sports titles, GTA. More or less everything build by one of the big three uses their own in-house engine.

Err at least some Battlefield games, fifa 17 and 18 use frostbite engine. I don't think one can call it custom.

> what is the most used engine today if not UE nor Unity?

My answer was aimed at that part. But yeah, maybe we should define what "custom" is.

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