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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

developer.apple.com

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Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#341

Post by rsp1984 »

_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…

All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.

That of course depends on the definition of "gaming space".

The classical desktop gaming space, Apple was never a player in it. They simply don't care about it. Hence why they treated OpenGL on macOS the way they did.

But: Apple is arguably the biggest player in the mobile gaming space. That's what they care about. So instead of spending a large amount of money to attract a low number of AAA desktop titles to their OS they just tap into the vast (game-)developer base that they already have in iOS and make it easy for them to deploy and sell their games on macOS too [1].

The move to deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL in favor of Metal makes total sense in that regard.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/apple-is-bringing-the-best...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#342

Post by bayindirh »

ocharles wrote: post #323
bayindirh wrote: post #320

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…

> Always the same outrage has happened, but things normalize then. People, companies adapt, hell does not freeze over, company doesn't go bankrupt. But that doesn't mean we took the best path. There is always an alternative future if x hadn't happened at all. If x hadn't happened, we might be in a better place, rather than accepting it and doing the best we can.

> But that doesn't mean we took the best path. There is always an alternative future if x hadn't happened at all. If x hadn't happened, we might be in a better place, rather than accepting it and doing the best we can.

Of course. I didn't mean to say that Apple is designing the best possible future or making the best possible decisions. I'd rather have a future where these technologies are supported as first class citizens by everyone, and I can just cross compile this stuff with virtually no porting or optimization effort, however unfortunately this is not the world we live in right now.

As I said, mine is an observation rather than taking one side.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#343

Post by p0nce »

psyc wrote: post #325

As a long-time professional game engine programmer, it is hard for me to see consternation over things like this, and avoid judging it as mainly ignorance. The amount of code in an engine that needs to touch the graphics API is tiny. A handful of methods for device init, filling buffers, uploading shaders, setting state, and saying "draw!" All of the graphics API code can easily fit in one medium-sized source file. A…

I'm one of the happy persons about this move, because my competition use OpenGL on Mac and I just use software rendering. It was easy to see this deprecation coming...

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#344

Post by tormeh »

bananaboy wrote: post #193
kilon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate. MacOS gaming is not only not dead it’s flourishing rapidly. Take a trip to Steam shop. You will find a massive amount of games are made for MacOS and the numbers are growing rapidly since Apple lost interest into OpenGL. But then MacOS has reached a 10% of the desktop market making it much harder to ignore than in the past when it barely reach…

If you look at the most recent Steam hardware survey though 96.3% of players are on Windows and 3.07% are on macOS. I don't know if that's "flourishing rapidly". It's certainly going up slowly. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Mac has twice the amount of users on Steam that Linux has. And game studios mostly ignore Linux. Apple making themselves precious is not going to win them any hearts in the game industry.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#345

Post by vonmoltke »

kayoone wrote: post #263
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…

To be fair, most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc, which all support Metal already. Hardly anyone writes their own game engines these days, and if they do they probably have the resources to support Metal. Overall still a bummer though.

> To be fair, most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc

What's the "etc"? Are there any other engines in that set?

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#346

Post by TheCabin »

psyc wrote: post #325

As a long-time professional game engine programmer, it is hard for me to see consternation over things like this, and avoid judging it as mainly ignorance. The amount of code in an engine that needs to touch the graphics API is tiny. A handful of methods for device init, filling buffers, uploading shaders, setting state, and saying "draw!" All of the graphics API code can easily fit in one medium-sized source file. A…

Professional game engines are not the only application for OpenGL, though. Many people would like to build cross-platform software without using major abstraction layers, such as game engines. This could be research software, prototypes, small tools in general.. -- I think there is a long list. For these people life might get harder.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#347

Post by sundvor »

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.

I've yet to see anyone build a hardcore Mac gaming machine.

Oh wait, you can't.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#348

Post by jernfrost »

sundvor wrote: post #259
_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://for…

Does it matter anymore? People are using less and less of the higher level stuff of OpenGL. Most of the graphics code is now in the engine. OpenGL is getting very outdated, who starting a project today would chose it over Vulcan, Directx or Metal? I would bet most small shops would prefer to use some sort of middle layer or engine from a third party. That pushes the problem of implementing the lower layers in Vulcan, DirectX or Metal to a small group of specialists.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#349

Post by jernfrost »

drb91 wrote: post #110
Sephr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately you can still use Vulkan on iOS and Mac OS through MoltenVK[1], a Vulkan implemention in Metal. [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Why is Apple investing in Metal at all then?

Tailored to their hardware, more modern and is written in Objective-C which makes it much easier for Mac developers to integrate in their projects, since Objective-C interface nicely with Swift and most script languages.

Re: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

#350

Post by jernfrost »

mikenew wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space. In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.

And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.

You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind.

Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.

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