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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#311

Post by jcelerier »

seandougall wrote: post #243
xienze wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure they’re worried about apps breaking. They’ve certainly stuck to the “no more 32bit iOS apps” thing.

Apple can get away with that on iOS, but they're a lot more conservative with macOS. To expand on your example, I maintain a legacy app that is stuck in 32-bit land because it relies on the QuickTime framework. QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years, and the transition to 64-bit has been in progress for over a decade, and yet my legacy app runs just fine even under the Mojave beta. There are multiple time bomb…

> QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years,

It has entirely been removed from the latest (since 10.12 IIRC?) SDKs so now you have to keep older SDKs just to build your app.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#312

Post by Marazan »

mikenew wrote: post #278
ksec wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better ) But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.

PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming. The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush…

Woah now, Clash Royale is a good game that is skill driven.

People take level 1 accounts into legendary arena which shows that skill dominates money.

How on earth the devs at Supercell tricked management into making a skill rather than money based game is genuinely a mystery to me.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#313

Post by exDM69 »

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.

While Vulkan is a bit verbose, it's not an order of magnitude difference if you follow modern OpenGL best practices. If you rely on default state and use the default framebuffer and rely on implicit synchonization, you can squeeze it down to a few hundred lines but that's not a good foundation to build practical apps on.

To give a ballpark figure, my Vulkan "base code" is less than 2x what my OpenGL boilerplate is for the same functionality. The big difference: the Vulkan code is easy to understand, but the GL code is not.

Comparing "Hello World" doesn't make much sense, OpenGL gets really darn complicated once you get past the basics.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#314

Post by patrickg_zill »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #295
patrickg_zill wrote: post #80

To me this signals that the Second Moribundity of Apple is nigh. The First Moribundity was the period in the 1990s when Apple was coasting on the DTP and Photoshop advantage over Windows they had, reducing the features of their desktops and not innovating. Schindler, a smart but ineffective leader, was replaced by Gil Amelio, a star in his prior field but unable to get Apple headed in the right direction. It took Job…

The difference is that in the 90s they were close to bankruptcy whereas today they are swimming in cash. That's not going to help them much in the long run if they have lost their vision, but they are definitely too large nowadays to go away within a few years. You may call me Captain Obvious now. :)

I think it is a good point, and they could probably survive about 2.5 years of losses without too much pain - but Apple's margins back in the 1990s were pretty good also: what hurt them was that sales dropped off a cliff, so their good margins weren't enough to save them...

There could be a number of factors that would hurt them, like margin compression, reaching market saturation, etc. All the ailments that Business Schools will warn you about...

However, they (IMHO) have become arrogant and out of touch with their users. VISION is their problem.

They need the MacBooks and desktop Macs to be seen as very desirable, in order to project the "creative people buy Apple" halo over the rest of their products.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#315

Post by exDM69 »

chabsf wrote: post #52
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 "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.

> OpenGL is "learnable" by someone in the process of learning.

If this is the case, it's only because there is much more material and tutorials written. Not because OpenGL is simpler or better.

I know because I watch noobs stumble with OpenGL all the time over at ##opengl in freenode. It usually takes them a week or two to get a triangle on screen, and they're super confused about semi-opaque concepts such as "vertex array objects" (they're well documented in the OpenGL wiki, but reading documentation seems to be out of fashion).

It would certainly help (them) if they had a good knowledge about 3d graphics in general before stumbling into OpenGL. But if they had, they'd be able to do it using Vulkan or Metal with no great difficulty. OpenGL isn't at all better here.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#316

Post by xxs »

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.

>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.

There should do, albeit not for gaming but most of the office software is Windows with DirectX support. You won't be playing on, though.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#318

Post by tannhaeuser »

I'm getting a bit worried about Apple dropping out of the business of producing professional tools and rig. I always liked that you can walk into an Apple retail shop and get a decent Unix notebook (though I've opted for a different notebook for my last purchase because of the lack of display, keyboard, and port options). But with Apple pulling out of OpenGL, what little pro (or at least pro enough for me) F/OSS software for 3D (Blender) and other graphical stuff was running on Mac OS won't any longer. I can't imagine Blender has the resources and inclination to port their software over to Metal, especially when Apple deliberately torpedoes their efforts.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#320

Post by bayindirh »

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be the Devil's advocate here, but just wanted to share an observation.

Apple always removes stuff which looks untimely or just plain stupid (headphone jacks, optical drives, USB/Firewire ports, optical in & out, rosetta, APIs, etc).

Always the same outrage has happened, but things normalize then. People, companies adapt, hell does not freeze over, company doesn't go bankrupt.

I feel that maintaining OpenGL & OpenCL felt like a burden to Apple. We all know that Apple likes to control everything from hardware to user interface, and GPU drivers are one of the most notoriously complex, overprotected part of the software stack. In the OpenCL world compilers and other stuff (I don't remember the terms clearly, sorry) also gets in, and makes everything much more complex.

Maybe this move will help them to slim the drivers to the basic "hardware-software" interface level and build metal and related technologies to their own term on top of this relatively simple interface.

I have a feeling that metal can be directly translated bidirectionally and relatively cheaply to OpenGL (and maybe Vulkan and OpenCL too), so at the end things don't become extremely complex for everyone.

Apple doesn't feel that backwards compatibility is strictly necessary unless things can be translated and made to work with relatively good performance.

As a Linux and Mac user for 10+ years, these are my observations. They may be wrong, technically incomplete or else. Feel free to discuss, debunk, or downvote.

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