I would be a lot more okay with this if Apple supported Vulkan, the more portable comparable API, rather than just the macOS/iOS-only Metal.
I also wonder what means for WebGL and its future. Right now, WebGL works in browsers on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, which is incredible. There is no equivalent.
Sure, Apple has started working on WebGPU, but that’s not yet ready nor is it guaranteed to gain Linux, Windows, Android support.
Apple has so little to gain over Vulkan by developing its own API but so much to lose by not adopting Vulkan (gaming companies may actually prefer developing games on the cross-platform Vulkan to target macOS/iOS devices, too, at the same time, instead of using DirectX).
Obsidian didn't manage to materialize a Khronos working group, so it's not moving forward. Apple instead went with the W3C to form the GPUWeb group, based on their work on WebGPU. The Obsidian folks at Mozilla have decided to follow this path instead, see here:
However, there's no real writeup of what the API will end up remotely looking like right now, so it's too early to speculate. WebGPU's original prototype used Metal's shading language for instance (since the prototype came from WebKit), but any real standard probably will probably change things up.
I believe the webgpu-servo folks have, in the mean time, begun working on lower level components/libraries to target Vulkan/DX12/Metal, for use by systems like WebGPU. Sort of like ANGLE by the Chrome team, but for newer GFX APIs.
TL;DR absolutely nothing is fleshed out at all yet and it seems plenty will probably change
Maybe Nadella will push for Vulkan support on Xbox, or maybe Xbox will die off, who knows. Unless one of those happens, DirectX is not going away. As soon as consoles come into the equation, you are stuck writing a PAL (or using an existing engine that already has one) because they use proprietary APIs and that's unlikely to change.
It's not ideal, but that's the reality. Apple is following the idiotic status quo, but it's not fair to single them out for it (that being said, at least Microsoft supports Vulkan and OGL on one of their platforms - but the 3rd-party driver developers are mostly responsible for the great support).
My bet is they spin the whole gaming division off or sell it to someone like Amazon. It’s not really a great fit anymore and IMO they need to be bolted to a company with a greater interest in the creative side of the business (i.e. running a movie/game studio) than Microsoft.
They don't have anything to loose regarding not adopting Vulkan, because all game engines that matter to professional game studios already added Metal support.
Same applies to Photoshop and other relevant 2D and video editing professional tooling.
Professional game studios always favored hardware specific APIs that allows them to extract all the juice up to the last drop.
For example, OpenGL ES 1.0 + Cg on the PS3 was an adoption failure, with everyone adopting the PS3 specific APIs.
Seconded. This seems like a major step back for x-platform GPGPU. I always just assumed a natural transition from GL, CL support to Vulkan would occur at some point, but this is just a shame.
Maybe there is no equivalent, but WebGL is not a mature technology. Webgl stuff still breaks or has performance bugs whenever some part of the OS/Browser/GPU Driver/GPU Hardware sandwich changes. You can run the conformance tests yourself.
I don't see how a technology can get to a mature status if a major hardware company decides to not support it. The real question is WHY don't they support it? Is there a webMetal?
All we know is that Apple was bankrolling a portion of OpenGL development on OSX and now they feel otherwise. OpenGL ARB is a committee and Apple has only one vote. Maybe they were not satisfied with the direction the spec was going. Its certainly not an unfounded belief.
>I don't see how a technology can get to a mature status if a major hardware company decides to not support it.
Alternate reading - They gave it their time and money, and it didn't work out.
I'd be a lot more okay with this if Apple would drop the Metal moniker, as I still have a functioning Virge with MeTaL acceleration and is still in use.
Lol, Metal is Mac-only which relies heavily on CoreWhatever dependencies and thus can never be cross-platform, right? The only reason any game or CAD developer even supports Mac at all is because OpenGL is a cross-platform API that works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so they only have to write one type of shader program, etc. No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations".
If you're Pixelmator or Apple's own Final Cut team, sure, use Metal. For anyone else that wants to make a living, supporting multiple platforms is a given, so you won't pay the slightest attention to this deprecation notice.
I think they're expecting developers to use existing engines such as Unity and Unreal. Most game developers probably already use those engines are will not be effected.
On the other hand, they definitely made it harder for developers to create a new game engine.
Game engine not so much, Apple has always been an "also ran" when it came to games. Moreover, these days nobody is writing new major game engines - it is just way too expensive and difficult to justify vs. downloading Unity and starting building your game. Furthermore, games have always been something that is on the market for a year or two and then it is done for, with the developers moving on.
However, where it will have major effect is availability of any professional software. Such as CAD. Mac has always been a pain in the ... platform to support because of their weird "Unix but not quite" ways of doing things and now there will be no justification to support it anymore, especially in the OSS sphere. E.g. I fully expect things like KiCAD (and also the commercial Eagle which has Mac support) PCB CAD to disappear from Mac as soon as OpenGL is removed. Nobody has resources to rewrite such software to use Apple-specific Metal. Another such project is OpenSceneGraph, a large building block for 3D visualization and simulation applications.
> No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations".
Actually, most game developers do that. Pretty much every game (even ones with a custom, "non-AAA" engine) will have some kind of abstraction layer for dealing with graphics API's. Writing an additional backend for Metal is not a monumental undertaking -- it's a tiny fraction of the overall code you will end up writing. Also game consoles, for the most part, use their own graphics API's which are not portable to desktop PC's.
While that may be somewhat true (and I disagree with the tiny fraction assessment, unless you are measuring in some other metric than time investment), I feel like it would still greatly increase your QA budget. Each additional back-end that is supported now requires extensive testing through the game development process.
In my experience, trying to get OpenGL to behave the same way (and with the same performance) on a bunch of different systems is actually more work than just maintaining multiple backends. Testing OpenGL on Windows does not in any way guarantee that it's going to work on Linux, or macOS, or whatever else -- even if you don't add a crazy OpenGL extension support matrix into the mix. So your QA budget is already going to include testing OpenGL on all those platforms.
That's kind of true for games, but he's totally right about CAD and other software. Big 3d applications Nuke, Houdini, Maya all use OpenGL. Before OSX, Mac versions either didn't exist or were kept up about as well as IE or Word was. Over the past 5-10 years they've been reliably released for OSX at the same time Windows and Linux versions were (they all originated on IRIX). They all have a lot of other development going on and I don't see any of these companies making and maintaining a Metal version.
I'm sure the Mac version of these tools aren't used by any studio with more than 5 people, but independent contractors, small studios, and individuals working at home really benefit (or else they wouldn't have bothered to port and maintain up until now).
Yeah, but that really sucks for people who use powerhouse tools that took 15 years to develop because we were able to use Macs, but it's looking less and less likely going forward.
I really like the idea of creating more space for the little guy. I want them to do well, but honestly I haven't had the best experience. As someone who uses the professional tools during the day, but has only the occasional needs for personal use I was happy to pay for a Mac-only tool. In practice, for a tool I only grab every few months I often find there was a regression in some feature that I guess is only used moderately often (selection boxes), it doesn't currently support that feature (I can't remember, but it was something like HSV color space, more than 8bpp, or some file format like TGA or PNG--not features you'd add to v1, but nothing too obscure), or there's another paid upgrade.
Even beloved Mac tools like Panic's Transmit, I feel like I can't 100% rely on. At a moment's notice I'll have to jump to something else to finish the task.
All things considered, I think there are some companies that are worse to the FOSS community than Apple, but I can't think of one that has Apple's degree of baldfaced cynicism to exploiting FOSS and open standards only to the degree that it benefits Apple, and then throwing them under the bus the instant they're no longer useful.
Apple loved HTML5 when they had to kill Flash and get web developers to support mobile, but then as soon as it became a threat to the App Store, Safari's compliance came to a screeching halt and now Safari is in last place, even behind Microsoft's browsers, in HTML5 support.
OpenGL was useful when it was a way to potentially lure people away from Windows, but as soon as Apple had the clout to not care about it and force develops onto its proprietary API, that's what happened.
I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside. Makes you wonder what's going to happen if and when Apple no longer needs Clang/LLVM, or, hell, Unix.
> I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside.
Well, to be honest, Apple has always been quite consistent here. They created their own ecosystem and made interoperability with other systems as difficult as possible, at software and hardware level. So this announcement is quite in line with that.
Mac OS X is based on the closed source NextStep; in many respects, the Darwin kernel is the continuation of NextStep's kernel. A fair amount of the user space code of OS X is from FreeBSD, which to the best of my knowledge continues along merrily open source as ever. Apple actually hired one of FreeBSD's lead developers to manage their BSD technology group.
And, I mean, c'mon. The move from NextStep to Darwin moved the kernel to open source. Webkit? Open source. CUPS? Still open source. Clang and LLVM and Swift? Open source, open source, open source. Apple maintains an open source page. They put stuff on GitHub.
I get some of the hostility toward Apple here; they're not always good at playing with others, there have been complaints about the way they do (or don't) contribute to projects they benefit from. But the narrative that Apple hates everything open under all circumstance and is all about proprietary everything all the time just isn't supported by reality.
Apple has a tiny market share when it comes to 3D applications - OpenGL is mostly the "pro" 3D world, be it CAD, 3D visualization, 3D simulation and similar. None of that runs on Macs, everything is Windows/Linux these days.
So there will be little "forcing" into their proprietary APIs - the few 3D developers that actually tried to support Mac will kill the platform off because nobody is going to rewrite major piece of software to use Mac-only Metal. Too much effort for little to no benefit.
Basically Apple just killed off any 3D support they may have hoped for on Mac. Including any hopes on anything VR related (so much Oculus/Vive fans hoping for seeing a Mac support - it is now even less likely than Linux one ...).
There is a 3rdparty port of Vulkan and I am sure there will be 3rdparty OpenGL drivers (e.g. Mesa) but nobody is going build a CAD system on top of that, IMO. Without official vendor support it is just too risky.
Okay, thats one explanation. The alternate explanation is that Apple supports mature and robust technologies because they want whats in their users' best interest. Neither OpenGL nor OpenCL in their current form are robust. Certainly, that is not to deny that Apple might have a vested interest, but its naive to think that everything is just black or white.
RE: HTML5 - Apple simply made a mistake. Jobs famously said that they don't want to support native apps because bad apps could bring down cellphone towers.
OpenGL and OpenCL aren’t “robust” on macOS because Apple stopped updating their drivers after the version 4.2, which has been released circa 2011. Current version of the standard is 4.6, released July 2017.
Robustness is orthogonal to versioning. They were funding opengl dev on osx, and decided to stop. You can insert your own reasoning but I believe the more reasonable assumption here is that they were not happy with the direction the spec was going. Apple is strongly biased towards vertical integration. Owning the spec + OS + driver + hardware is the best way of achieving a high level of robustness (Whether they actually do achieve that remains to be seen).
Related to the article (but not the subject here); as a
user of "dark" themes:
The precise wording they use seems to indicate a view of dark themed sets as being less colorful. High contrast themes and visibility aiding limitations in theme color use have their places; so too do themes based around darker, more night time, friendly colors. Thinking of a system as having only one true theme, or of light/dark as being full / visually impaired themes is a dangerously limiting misconception.
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, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.
>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.
I'm not an OpenCL programmer by trade, but I have dabbled in it (Wrote an AES decrypter in OpenCL) and I have never found this proposition to be true.
Agreed, I am in a similar situation. This is very sad. Also, while OpenCL is a bit verbose to interact with directly, Vulkan compute shaders are much much worse. I realise that at some point I will have to start using it, but I'm not looking forward it.
> 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.
I know that Apple is commercial organisation and not a charity but projects like Blender bring a lot to the platform.
It would be great to find out later that Apple had reached out to the Blender dev team with a strategy on how to move to either Metal or a Vulcan/Metal adaptor.
Personally I was thinking about getting an eGPU just for Blender use. It would be a shame to have to leave macOS just to run Blender.
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.
I sure hate it when Microsoft does it, but at least they have market share. Who wants to support Metal just to target the Mac? And last I checked I have the choice of OpenGL and Vulkan on Windows because these days MS doesn't control the hardware stack from top to bottom on their software platform.
>I sure hate it when Microsoft does it, but at least they have market share. Who wants to support Metal just to target the Mac?
Plenty of big 3D/CAD/etc players? In lots of creative areas, the Mac dominates still (despite stories about people moving to Windows nobody's going anywhere, where nobody = quite few creatives overall).
Besides, with Metal they'll target iOS as well, and that's a huge platform, and where most of the profits are for mobile.
CAD on Mac is pretty much non-existent, as is any professional 3D market - the market share isn't there, the hardware support is terrible, so few major players bother with supporting Macs. All this stuff is either Windows (CAD) or Linux (3D simulation, visualization) these days.
And with this deprecation Mac is pretty much dead as a platform for professional 3D.
Creative Suite has run better on PC and at better price-performance ratio for almost a decade.
Graphic Designers still like Macs for the most part I guess -- and I still see them in video production a lot, but that's starting to change pretty quickly.
It’s not deprecated because it’s not even there to begin with — Windows 10 doesn’t ship OpenGL by default; GPU vendors provide their own implementations.
Which AFAIK they’re free to do on MacOS as well, they just don’t seem to bother since Apple was doing that work for them
At least on Windows, the OpenGL implementation is part of the graphics driver. Why? Because by default Windows only has between rudimentary (at least up to Vista, I think; I am not sure about Windows 7 and 8.1) and no (Windows 10) OpenGL support - this is what the GPU vendors provides as part of his graphics driver.
Which AFAIK they’re free to do on MacOS as well, they just don’t seem to bother since Apple was doing that work for them
I'm not sure. NVIDIA provides updates for CUDA and an extremely limited amount of updates for their graphics stack (AFAIK none at all for integrated graphics, for example).
That depends on who you ask. OpenGL is in the deprecated API section on MSDN[1]. Because of the ICD model, Microsoft can't prevent GPU vendors from adding OpenGL features, but they don't bother integrating it with modern Windows APIs. You can't create an OpenGL context on a DirectComposition surface or in a UWP app. It integrates poorly with the compositor. You can't get composition feedback, and most drivers will flicker or show artifacts when windows are resized. OpenGL apps don't get windowed-fullscreen optimizations and you can't control when they enter exclusive fullscreen mode. I don't think you can use windowed-stereoscopic or windowed-HDR either. All these issues push developers away from OpenGL and towards DirectX, which is what Microsoft wants.
Although I agree it's a terrible decision for Apple only to have Apple-specific graphics APIs, please note that:
* Being deprecated does not mean that things will suddenly stop working. It will take a few more releases of macOS before this can be removed.
* Next to MoltenVK there is MoltenGL, which is an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 that runs on (edit) Metal [1]. That indicates it's at least feasible to wrap OpenGL applications in the future if necessary.
Furthermore, Apple wil drop support for all Macs that don't support Vulkan in this release of macOS [2]. Ouch, what a waste.
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...
OpenGL is pretty. Much prettier than these Metal and Vulkan abominations.
The difference is that OpenGL is designed to be easy for humans. glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glVertex3f(x, y, z)...; glEnd(); you can't beat that. The issue is that it hard for the driver to optimize.
That's where Metal and Vulkan come into play. These are low level APIs, sacrificing user friendliness for a greater control over the hardware. It is designed for 3D engines, not for application developers.
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 behind your back while you are trying to have a smooth frame rate.
1990s-style OpenGL was good for the time. In 2018, OpenGL is a pile of poop.
Each to their own but over the last 6 months I've written a graphics engine in openGL + SDL. Once you truly understand modern openGL you realise how beautiful it is.
You will think it's less beautiful when you ship that game on several platforms and find that it has different bugs on each platform, on each hardware version, and on each driver version. And most of these bugs you can't fix or work around, you just have to bug the vendor and hope they ship a fix in a few months, which they usually won't because your game is too small for them to care about.
This happens in other APIs too (we definitely had it happen with DX11), it's just that OpenGL is a lot more complicated than anything else due to its history, so it has proportionally more bugs.
Maybe the games were not very complex? Professional game programmers building games with lots of shaders are very familiar with what I am talking about. See for example this thread:
I think the recompilations being talked about here are shaders generated by the OpenGL implementation behind your back. That is, your program never sees them as shader or program objects because they implement some permutation of blend mode, depth test, culling type, etc..
> 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.
In my opinion a similar difference exists between CUDA and OpenCL. OpenCL takes more code to get something simple going. But at least it doesn't break if you upgrade your gcc or use a different GPU vendor.
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.
> glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glVertex3f(x, y, z)...; glEnd();
That's fine for a "hello triangle" program, but quickly becomes ridiculous for anything approaching a serious engine. There's a reason that glDrawArrays() has been around since 1995 (and part of the core specification since 1997).
I suppose it got flagged as a dupe due to duplicated URL. However, I believe it shouldn't be - "what's new in macOS" is completely uninteresting to me, while deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL is a big news.
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.
At least you'll have the option with the games being part of steam. How many games are unplayable and never will be playable again on any phone that upgraded to iOS 11?
I would be surprised if it disappears entirely. More likely some third-party hero (or perhaps Apple themselves) will spin off their GL implementation as a separate package - see XQuartz.
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.
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 reached 3%. With iOS dominating mobile revenue , Appple is the undisputed king of gaming for over a decade now.
The backend plays a minor role, as I repeatedly say and I am repeatedly downvoted by ignorant people. Unreal supports on MacOS not one but 3 technologies. OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal and that is just for graphics. There is also CUDA, OpenCL, PhysicsX and much more that go far beyond the scope of 3d graphics.
A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK.
At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities.
So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level.
Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.
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.
Well I will just mention that i am an iMac user since 2007 and I replying to your message with Win 10 via Bootcamp. Mac gamers choose the bootcamp route because its an easy solution and gives access to more games and software. I am willing to bet that Mac gamers are at least 8% if not more. Bootcamp became popular way before Steam did and way before we saw the big switch of big Game studio from pure Windows to Windows/MacOS. Windows also has a notorious reputaiton of being far more stable on bootcamp that a regular pc and and its a reputation that my personal experience confirms it. Because I am a developer I have decided to stick with Win 10 and bootcamp and it has been a smooth ride so far but from time to time I go back to MacOS. Windows 10 also has been the first reliable OS that came from Microsoft.
Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming.
Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.
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 anywhere else. All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
>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.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
I played the fuck out of Angry Birds - on Android. How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? That was a rhetorical question BTW, don't even try to answer it. Apple are being arrogant as fuck with this.
>How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone?
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
I'm not saying there aren't decent games on iOS. You can find gems like Monument Valley, Florence, or, as I mentioned, the games ported from other platforms like Limbo, Terraria, and so on. But take a look at the top charts on the iOS app store and compare that to the top games on Steam. With few exceptions, the games on iOS are riddled with ads, microtransactions, and are designed to be as addictive as possible.
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
Not if Microsoft has any say. I can't count the number of Windows Updates that re-installed the previously uninstalled Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga and March of Empires (among titles).
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, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
That I certainly agree. But I do think the future are Games built on top of Game engine. Unreal seems to have a massive improvement changelog every 6 months and if Unity didn't exist I did doubt how anyone is going to compete within a reasonable budget.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
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.
Additionally, I don't think indie developers have loads of time on their hands to port their niche games over to a new technology. I can see Unity supporting Metal, but smaller platforms (jMonkeyEngine) will have a slower adoption rate, and in that time hopefully open-source middleware will come out to handle legacy APIs.
I don't expect there will ever be an AAA game presence on macOS at this point, given so few of their machines offer dedicated GPUs anymore.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
"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.
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).
True, but they didn't remove OpenGL, they simply deprecated it (e.g. don't expect any updates to it, new tooling will not be built around it, etc). That shouldn't affect legacy apps.
Yes, and deprecation doesn’t mean a lot on the Mac. Apple often deprecates stuff and still leaves it in. They remove it only when there’s something to be gained.
(eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
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 bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted.
Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
True — 10.12 is my recollection as well — but I’ve been bitten so many times by compiling under a new SDK, especially with an older build target, that I do that as a matter of course anyway.
They said in the Platform State of the Union that Mojave will be the last macOS that runs 32bit apps, so QuickTime.framework and your app are running out of time!
I find it hard to fathom that people think a huge software company like Apple doesn’t have awareness of the impact of its changes or people responsible for compatibility.
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.
Why use Libre Office on a Mac when Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free (as in beer)? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a baseless argument that the Libre Office install base on the Mac is very low. On iOS it’s non-existent.
There is no way that Pages, Numbers and Keynote can open as wide a range of file formats that LibreOffice can. And there are way more features in LibreOffice.
Having used pages and word, please don't tell people to use Pages for everything.
It doesn't have the features you need when you're creating more complex documents. Last time I've used it it didn't even allow you to have different sections which allow you switch between the rotation of pages.
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 rely on OpenGL these days as well ?
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.)
microsoft changed the pen behavior in one of the creators' updates and now the pen buttons behave strangely (randomly dont work in certain applications) as well as the pen being registered as a finger in legacy applications for a while... making windows 7 the only really viable way to use wacom for a professional (speaking as one)
let alone the inability to reconfigure things like n-trig pens to have hover right click/middle click functionality, it's been INCREDIBLY frustrating without any communication from microsoft.
I've got the Intuos Pro from a couple models back. Windows Ink randomly causes pressure sensitivity to drop out (especially since the creators update.) On Windows 8 I never had trouble with the wireless adapter, now I have to run wired. Button clicks don't always register and sometimes will send the wrong input.
Overall it's rough, there are days where it seems better than others - but I'll randomly lose sensitivity and multiple reboots appears to be the only pseudo-consistent means of getting it back.
That being said - It's still way more usable than Photoshop/Illustrator on my Mac.
I miss 15 years ago when I had CS2 + Intuos Pro 2 and everything just worked.
I'm in the same boat, my so called Pro machine the USB-C 2017 MBP has had glitching out completely unusable rendering on the latest version of Illustrator since October 2017. Adobe blame Apple, presumably Apple blame Adobe because neither of them are fixing it.
As if my deteriorating keys on this machine were not bad enough. This wasn't a good WWDC for me. My PC is working great despite being an obscure setup with mismatched GPUs, can't say I understand why the graphic designer workhorse machine MBP is unusable with Illustrator and that is working just fine..
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?
AutoCAD is a dead technology. Architects/Stuctural Engineers/MEP Engineers are moving to BIM platforms (Revit, ArchiCAD, etc)! Product/Automotive/Industrial design and engineering use PLM tools (Catia, SolidWorks, etc). Besides, AutoCAD didn’t/doesn’t need much graphics power at all. AFAIK it never really used OpenGL.
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.
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.
The other figure to look at is the amount of money spent. If it's similar to the hardware percentage then you're right, if on the other hand, macOS users spend more on games then a rethink is in order.
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.
Yes, but OpenGL is so outdated that the people that should use it the most (game and 3D application developers) were avoiding it due to a hardware vs. API incompatibility.
Vulcan was created to get that same portability, with an API that fits modern hardware.
All the target systems had latest Windows updates, and they all run Direct3D 11 software just fine (I mostly develop for D3D and I test on them). On some systems it works in 10.1 compatibility mode, MS calls that “feature levels”. Not a big deal in practice, the majority of D3D11 stuff still works OK.
No. Both ATI and Nvidia drivers include recent OpenGL versions, so OpenGL support problems are limited to actually not capable hardware.
In the old link you offer as example, Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions (hence the need to downgrade the client), and fortunately obsolete. Current Intel integrated graphics have improved. And VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
> Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions
Technically that’s probably true. However, if you drop support of Intel GPUs, your GL4+ software will no longer run on a huge count of older Windows laptops people are still using. For many kinds of software this is a bad tradeoff. That’s exactly why all modern browsers implement WebGL on top of Direct3D, and overwhelming majority of multi-platform games and 3D apps use D3D when running on Windows.
> VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
It’s only terrible for OpenGL. The virtual GPU driver uses host GPU to render stuff, and it runs D3D11-based software just fine. I don’t use it for gaming but it’s nice to be able to use a VM to reproduce and fix bugs in my software caused by outdated OS, windows localizations, and other environmental factors.
That's not why they do that at all. They don't need anything recent from OpenGL or Direct3D, which is why they target DX9. And DX9 specifically is targetted because that also works on XP, which D3D10 doesn't.
Intel GPUs D3D drivers have historically been better than their OpenGL ones (which isn't saying much since their D3D drivers are also trash), but now we're talking driver quality of one player which has nothing to do with the API itself or opengl somehow being outdated on windows.
But ANGLE also targets desktop OpenGL (and vulkan), and as OpenGL 4.3 adoption increases I'd expect increasingly more browsers to use it for WebGL 2.0 since you don't need translation there at all. OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0.
You seem to be pretty confused on how OpenGL versions line up with the D3D ones, too. For reference OpenGL 3.1 is roughly equivalent to D3D 10.1. When you're complaining about only getting GL 3.1, you're also complaining about being stuck with D3D 10.1
No, you're getting stuck at 3.0 because you're hitting the deprecation strategy. You need to specifically request a post-3.0 context with wglCreateContextAttribsARB which you're not doing. Thus the system thinks you're an old legacy OpenGL app, and is giving you 3.0 as that was the last version before things were removed.
> No, you're getting stuck at 3.0 because you're hitting the deprecation strategy.
I think you’re wrong here. Two reasons.
1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
2. Please read Intel’s documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... Specifically, please expand “2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors” section. As you see in that table, Intel says HD Graphics 3000/2000 only support OpenGL 3.1, which is exactly what I’m getting from the GLEW library I’m using in that project.
Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
> 1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
Behavior depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
> Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either. It still supports all the modern good stuff. And, as we've established at this point, it's not Window's stopping you from leveraging the full extent of the hardware you have. By contrast macOS does stop you from using the hardware you got to the fullest, as it's stuck on 4.1
> depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
For the systems I have in this house it’s not required, i.e. I’m getting the same OpenGL version that’s advertised by the GPU vendors.
> You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
> ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either.
Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is. And 4.0 is outdated, too (Intel Ivy Bridge). Meanwhile, modern Direct3D works fine on these GPUs, 11.0 feature level 10.1, and native 11.0, respectively.
> Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
Go read the extension I linked, it explains the behavior you're seeing. Also go read the tutorial I linked, it's using GLEW and shows you how to create a context.
You have a bug if your intention is to get a post-3.0 OpenGL context. Whether or not you care is up to you. You may be perfectly happy being in the compatibility bucket. I don't know. But you're not in the explicit 3.1 or later path.
> Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is.
Sandy Bridge is a 7 year old CPU. Of course it's outdated...? And D3D 10.1 is from 2007, it's also hugely outdated. You're getting anything more modern out of the hardware with D3D than you are OpenGL here. I don't even know what the argument you're trying to make is at this point.
But you have to rewrite it for every major hardware vendor, or else you won't get the performance you want.
GL should always work for the simple case, but instead you need to rewrite to avoid bugs in its many layers. And once you have Vulkan/Metal, industry-specific wrappers are better than the impossible to debug procedural GL junk.
I'm not sure I agree with the claim, but even if we take a full rewrite at face value, "every major graphics vendor" for desktop applications is NVIDIA and AMD/ATI. On mobiles, you're probably using Unity or similar middleware and therefore not thinking about bare metal (no pun intended)
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.
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. You get the first version of apps and games, or more polished versions of apps and games, on iOS this way.
Maybe.... why would you assume they continue developing for macs at all? Small studios might not have the resources, and the market is tiny for many apps, eg indie games, modeling software, and ML (to be fair, apple has repeatedly emphasized they don’t care about ML on the desktop by not offering nvidia cards...).
And again, I don’t see the benefit for apple over supporting cross platform apis to encourage development. It seems like a net loss for everyone but some line in their budget on driver maintenance.
They do make some money on Macs, and Mac software, but not nearly as much as on iOS.
Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS.
OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released.
In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal.
And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS.
And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a nice list, quite complete. Many console exclusives also use custom engines by the way, e.g. Decima for Horizon:ZD, KillZone and Death Stranding, Naughty Dog has their own engine (don't know the name), etc.
The OP's point was that the companies that make these engines can afford to invest in supporting an additional back-end API though. I think it's hard to argue that any of the companies that develop these engines would not be able to also add a Metal back-end. Many of them already work across a pretty wide range of back-ends anyway. Xbox One, PS4 and Switch all use completely different API's, for example. I think most of the work is not in adding an additional backend like Metal, but in tuning the back-end for some specific piece of hardware (NVidia vs. AMD vs. mobile GPU, etc).
Whether companies are actually willing to invest in a Metal back-end remains to be seen, but considering many of them license their engine for commerical use, I would be surprised if the major players will simply ignore Metal.
I tend to agree with Jonathan Blow's comments on Twitter, that the low-level graphics API should be just that: as low level as possible, small, focussed, and not actually intended (but still allowing!) to be used directly. Engines or higher-level API's can be built on top of that, with the option to dive down to the lowest level when needed (which will probably be a rare occasion).
DirectX will definitely not be this API because it is Windows specific. Likewise for Metal because it is Apple-specific. Blow appears to be of the opinion that Vulkan is also not moving in the right direction, because it is becoming too complex, and trying to be too many things for too many applications at the same time.
If true, in a sense, it's not that surprising Apple is doubling down on their own API. I think they should consider making the API open-source though, and develop something like MoltenVK (but the other way around) for Windows/Linux.
The top 10 most played today in steam are using UE4 (2), Source 2, Source (2), and custom engines (5: AnvilNext, RAGE, Evolution). That's a lot of variety, there's almost no reuse.
With a bit of luck, Godot Engine. Sort of a dark horse, but I like it and my very smart corporate-programmer brother likes it. He says it's designed like a programmer would design it: everything's a node. I know I did a game in Unity (which has become overcomplicated) and had a surprisingly easy time jumping into Godot.
The problem is still with apple forcing them to invest resources, without any reason, but to advance their vendor lock in. And if you're a developper of a small high performance 3d graphics and gpu computing library like me, its just a giant middle finger from apple and I will either need to drop opengl/opencl or apple - there is no way that i can afford to offer both, especially since i'd need to buy apple hardware to test things.
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?
>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.
It really isn't. The fastest GPU available is a Vega 64 underclocked to basically the performance of a normal Vega 56. A 1080Ti is ~50% faster. Even if you connect an external 1080Ti it's constrained by TB3 bandwidth.
Are there more Android devices that actually have hardware that can actually play high end games decently? The average Android phone is a low end phone - with an average selling price of $225 for all Android phones how can they not be?
OpenGL is part of the platform, they all support it. The stats page doesn't even include 'not supported' [1]
Being able to run anything slightly demanding is other thing, but you can't argue there's no support.
Also, the benchmark you linked is for application load, which is heavily influenced by storage speed and load method (android has to JIT compile sometimes) and has almost no impact from the graphics' performance other than the bus between CPU/memory and GPU
Being able to run something suboptimally doesn't turn into sales. I'm sure that the owner of a $70 Blu R1 HD is not going to be spending money on high end games.
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.
Go back in time six years ago. What were Apple’s choices?
(1) continue to live with the deficiencies of OpenGL. Remember that, over time, it had come to fail at one of its primary purposes which was to provide efficient access to GPU hardware. Further, sticking with OpenGL would be to accept the leadership of a group that had allowed its flagship standard to falter.
(2) They could marshal their resources and create the better API that the Khronos Group wouldn’t/couldn’t.
They really had no choice. Note that Vulkan wasn’t announced until after Metal was released.
The gripes in this are should really be leveled at the Khronos group, which fumbled their stewardship of OpenGL and, with it, the chance to lead open GPU APIs.
The time table is being pretty generous to Apple. Metal, Vulkan, and DX12 are reworked versions of Mantle.
The entire point of Mantle was to be a proof of concept that could be reworked into cross platform API (which became Vulkan), there was plenty of work already being done by Khronos in 2014 (and Apple knew this). And they just went out and released Metal anyway.
I also blame Microsoft for the same thing, early parts of the DX12 docs were taken word for word out of the Mantle docs, that's how similar they are. But Microsoft at least had couple decades of having a competing API, but Apple went out to create a new one for some reason.
Talk about rewriting history, Mantle wasn't never supposed to become Vulkan, it only happened because AMD was generous and Khronos would otherwise still be thinking how OpenGL Next would look like.
No games aren't going to target Metal to support the Mac any more than printer manufacturers are going to go out of thier way to support AirPrint to make printers Mac compatible.
What developers will do is go out of thier way to support iOS and supporting the Mac is just a side benefit. Just like almost every printer company supports the Mac as a byproduct of wanting to support iOS.
While I get the concern, everybody's history here is backwards. Apple released Metal 2 YEARS before Vulkan. Why? Because OpenGL wasn't hacking it anymore and had become too asymmetric. Vulkan copied Metal, not the other way around.
I'm not sure they should have spun around and dropped Metal for Vulkan once it became available, or slow down the pace of progress til the rest of the market caught up. Doesn't make sense.
Also Apple is perhaps the largest GPU manufacturer in the world, with 200-250M GPUs shipped in 2017. That is 4-5X of Nvidia! Also Apple is investing highly in AI from tools to devices to GPUs, being able to customize may have tremendous value.
It is highly possible that Apple sees owning their interface stack as a means to keep their software-hardware warchest a couple years ahead of the competition. Which in mobile has been paying off of the last 5 years, as they constantly have crushed all others by 2-3X.
I believe, as of now, there are more AAA games running Metal than there are running Vulkan. Pretty much every new macOS release is running Metal now, meanwhile a game running Vulkan on PC is considered a rarity.
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.
I've been using a cross-platform GUI framework/engine to do app development on all the platforms: Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android - and it has been a joy to deploy one app on all of these systems.
One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.
This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.
I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..
What the fuck?! I don’t get it, why?! They want us to focus on Metal? I definitely need to but desktop now, plus I want CUDA! Ryzen 5 2600X with GTX1070 and I’m done.
Very much in line with Apple's way of doing things. God forbid they'd adopt some sort of open standard - even though they've hugely benefited from them.
Yes, when they decided to drop all other ports AND their iphones still don’t have USB-C, so you cant use iOS headphones on your mac, and you cannot charge or sync via the default cable on your mac.
Nobody has USB-C stuff everything. Every owner is using a collection of dongles and it is absolutely stupid.
The OLED bar is also stupid.
I just hope my 2015 macbook never gets obsolete because I dislike the newer ones... and yes, I owned one, and I sold t after 2 weeks and got my 2015 back
Yes, and this was so much against their DNA that it required the chutzpah of a Carmack to get the Apple's CEO to implement the decision.
Apple is and has always been a strict leech on open ecosystems.
They try to build closed proprietary stuff first to lock you to the platform, and when what they build is bested by OpenSource, embrace it and move on to the next opportunity.
They did the exact same thing with BSD: grab a beautiful piece of OpenSource tech, bolt on a metric ton of proprietary closed source tech on top of it, and call the whole thing open source to get love and applause from the OSS crowd.
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:
If game developers -- and game engine developers -- targeting OpenGL now are in the process of moving to target Vulkan, and if MoltenVK ends up offering better performance on macOS than Apple's legendarily anemic OpenGL stack, isn't this likely to be better in the long run despite the short-term pain?
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.
Right, but it still involves several gigabytes of largely unused functionality to get a “hello world” and it pigeonholes you into a specific ecosystem. Unity is an entirely different offering from a graphics api.
I believe (hope) that OpenGL continues to be that developer-friendly API. Building OpenGL on top of Vulkan shouldn't be too hard, and it means we don't have to pointlessly deprecate and recreate the huge number of OpenGL resources out there.
OpenGL isn't friendly to developers on either side. Tutorials are generally not trustworthy, there's no cross platform debugging tools, and errors just get you a "something happened vOv" code.
If you care about performance it will just do something slow at uncontrollable points in the background, like copy CPU-GPU-CPU memory, synchronize against the GPU, do format conversions, etc.
If you're the one implementing GL, it's gotten gigantic again since they simplified it. GL 4.3/4.6 core has compute shaders, which means you have to implement OpenCL twice but different this time.
I would disagree with that, especially with regards to Metal. It's a very approachable and well-designed API. It might not have the volume of resources that OpenGL does, but the docs themselves are good, and I have seen plenty of intro-level tutorials that are decent enough. Debuggability is also much better than OpenGL, which I think is important for newcomers. Debugging OpenGL issues is very, very painful, especially with macOS's lack of debug extensions. Metal is described as "low-level", but it's not quite at the level of Vulkan -- things are simpler and more "streamlined".
There's also the problem that a large chunk of OpenGL learning materials out there are hopelessly outdated, and IMO actively detrimental to learning modern graphics techniques. Judging from the types of questions I see around various forums, it seems to be VERY hard for newcomers to distinguish between "bad" and "good" OpenGL tutorials. In general, there's too much cruft for learners to focus in on the stuff that is actually part of "good OpenGL".
> 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.
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.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadI also wonder what means for WebGL and its future. Right now, WebGL works in browsers on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, which is incredible. There is no equivalent.
Sure, Apple has started working on WebGPU, but that’s not yet ready nor is it guaranteed to gain Linux, Windows, Android support.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/tree/mas...
Apple has so little to gain over Vulkan by developing its own API but so much to lose by not adopting Vulkan (gaming companies may actually prefer developing games on the cross-platform Vulkan to target macOS/iOS devices, too, at the same time, instead of using DirectX).
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/pull/11#...
However, there's no real writeup of what the API will end up remotely looking like right now, so it's too early to speculate. WebGPU's original prototype used Metal's shading language for instance (since the prototype came from WebKit), but any real standard probably will probably change things up.
I believe the webgpu-servo folks have, in the mean time, begun working on lower level components/libraries to target Vulkan/DX12/Metal, for use by systems like WebGPU. Sort of like ANGLE by the Chrome team, but for newer GFX APIs.
TL;DR absolutely nothing is fleshed out at all yet and it seems plenty will probably change
Maybe Nadella will push for Vulkan support on Xbox, or maybe Xbox will die off, who knows. Unless one of those happens, DirectX is not going away. As soon as consoles come into the equation, you are stuck writing a PAL (or using an existing engine that already has one) because they use proprietary APIs and that's unlikely to change.
It's not ideal, but that's the reality. Apple is following the idiotic status quo, but it's not fair to single them out for it (that being said, at least Microsoft supports Vulkan and OGL on one of their platforms - but the 3rd-party driver developers are mostly responsible for the great support).
Same applies to Photoshop and other relevant 2D and video editing professional tooling.
Professional game studios always favored hardware specific APIs that allows them to extract all the juice up to the last drop.
For example, OpenGL ES 1.0 + Cg on the PS3 was an adoption failure, with everyone adopting the PS3 specific APIs.
>I don't see how a technology can get to a mature status if a major hardware company decides to not support it.
Alternate reading - They gave it their time and money, and it didn't work out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593272
If you're Pixelmator or Apple's own Final Cut team, sure, use Metal. For anyone else that wants to make a living, supporting multiple platforms is a given, so you won't pay the slightest attention to this deprecation notice.
On the other hand, they definitely made it harder for developers to create a new game engine.
However, where it will have major effect is availability of any professional software. Such as CAD. Mac has always been a pain in the ... platform to support because of their weird "Unix but not quite" ways of doing things and now there will be no justification to support it anymore, especially in the OSS sphere. E.g. I fully expect things like KiCAD (and also the commercial Eagle which has Mac support) PCB CAD to disappear from Mac as soon as OpenGL is removed. Nobody has resources to rewrite such software to use Apple-specific Metal. Another such project is OpenSceneGraph, a large building block for 3D visualization and simulation applications.
Actually, most game developers do that. Pretty much every game (even ones with a custom, "non-AAA" engine) will have some kind of abstraction layer for dealing with graphics API's. Writing an additional backend for Metal is not a monumental undertaking -- it's a tiny fraction of the overall code you will end up writing. Also game consoles, for the most part, use their own graphics API's which are not portable to desktop PC's.
I'm sure the Mac version of these tools aren't used by any studio with more than 5 people, but independent contractors, small studios, and individuals working at home really benefit (or else they wouldn't have bothered to port and maintain up until now).
I really like the idea of creating more space for the little guy. I want them to do well, but honestly I haven't had the best experience. As someone who uses the professional tools during the day, but has only the occasional needs for personal use I was happy to pay for a Mac-only tool. In practice, for a tool I only grab every few months I often find there was a regression in some feature that I guess is only used moderately often (selection boxes), it doesn't currently support that feature (I can't remember, but it was something like HSV color space, more than 8bpp, or some file format like TGA or PNG--not features you'd add to v1, but nothing too obscure), or there's another paid upgrade.
Even beloved Mac tools like Panic's Transmit, I feel like I can't 100% rely on. At a moment's notice I'll have to jump to something else to finish the task.
Apple loved HTML5 when they had to kill Flash and get web developers to support mobile, but then as soon as it became a threat to the App Store, Safari's compliance came to a screeching halt and now Safari is in last place, even behind Microsoft's browsers, in HTML5 support.
OpenGL was useful when it was a way to potentially lure people away from Windows, but as soon as Apple had the clout to not care about it and force develops onto its proprietary API, that's what happened.
I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside. Makes you wonder what's going to happen if and when Apple no longer needs Clang/LLVM, or, hell, Unix.
Well, to be honest, Apple has always been quite consistent here. They created their own ecosystem and made interoperability with other systems as difficult as possible, at software and hardware level. So this announcement is quite in line with that.
And, I mean, c'mon. The move from NextStep to Darwin moved the kernel to open source. Webkit? Open source. CUPS? Still open source. Clang and LLVM and Swift? Open source, open source, open source. Apple maintains an open source page. They put stuff on GitHub.
I get some of the hostility toward Apple here; they're not always good at playing with others, there have been complaints about the way they do (or don't) contribute to projects they benefit from. But the narrative that Apple hates everything open under all circumstance and is all about proprietary everything all the time just isn't supported by reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#History
So there will be little "forcing" into their proprietary APIs - the few 3D developers that actually tried to support Mac will kill the platform off because nobody is going to rewrite major piece of software to use Mac-only Metal. Too much effort for little to no benefit.
Basically Apple just killed off any 3D support they may have hoped for on Mac. Including any hopes on anything VR related (so much Oculus/Vive fans hoping for seeing a Mac support - it is now even less likely than Linux one ...).
There is a 3rdparty port of Vulkan and I am sure there will be 3rdparty OpenGL drivers (e.g. Mesa) but nobody is going build a CAD system on top of that, IMO. Without official vendor support it is just too risky.
RE: HTML5 - Apple simply made a mistake. Jobs famously said that they don't want to support native apps because bad apps could bring down cellphone towers.
The precise wording they use seems to indicate a view of dark themed sets as being less colorful. High contrast themes and visibility aiding limitations in theme color use have their places; so too do themes based around darker, more night time, friendly colors. Thinking of a system as having only one true theme, or of light/dark as being full / visually impaired themes is a dangerously limiting misconception.
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, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.
:/
I'm not an OpenCL programmer by trade, but I have dabbled in it (Wrote an AES decrypter in OpenCL) and I have never found this proposition to be true.
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.
It would be great to find out later that Apple had reached out to the Blender dev team with a strategy on how to move to either Metal or a Vulcan/Metal adaptor.
Personally I was thinking about getting an eGPU just for Blender use. It would be a shame to have to leave macOS just to run Blender.
Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17231120
So yes, Vulkan is kind of the universal graphics API now.
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.
So like DirectX?
Plenty of big 3D/CAD/etc players? In lots of creative areas, the Mac dominates still (despite stories about people moving to Windows nobody's going anywhere, where nobody = quite few creatives overall).
Besides, with Metal they'll target iOS as well, and that's a huge platform, and where most of the profits are for mobile.
And with this deprecation Mac is pretty much dead as a platform for professional 3D.
Graphic Designers still like Macs for the most part I guess -- and I still see them in video production a lot, but that's starting to change pretty quickly.
I think the Final Cut "Pro" X was the inflection point - the change is ongoing.
Which AFAIK they’re free to do on MacOS as well, they just don’t seem to bother since Apple was doing that work for them
As far as I am aware Apple develops the GPU drivers for OS X (though, I think, based on code that the GPU vendor provides).
It's distributed with the Graphics Driver, but most of it exists in a user space library, not in the driver proper.
I'm not sure. NVIDIA provides updates for CUDA and an extremely limited amount of updates for their graphics stack (AFAIK none at all for integrated graphics, for example).
[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff8...
* Being deprecated does not mean that things will suddenly stop working. It will take a few more releases of macOS before this can be removed.
* Next to MoltenVK there is MoltenGL, which is an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 that runs on (edit) Metal [1]. That indicates it's at least feasible to wrap OpenGL applications in the future if necessary.
Furthermore, Apple wil drop support for all Macs that don't support Vulkan in this release of macOS [2]. Ouch, what a waste.
[1]: https://moltengl.com/moltengl/
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/04/macos-10-14-mojave-supported-... (anything from before 2012 does not support Vulkan)
You would be correct, but not on OSX.
The difference is that OpenGL is designed to be easy for humans. glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glVertex3f(x, y, z)...; glEnd(); you can't beat that. The issue is that it hard for the driver to optimize.
That's where Metal and Vulkan come into play. These are low level APIs, sacrificing user friendliness for a greater control over the hardware. It is designed for 3D engines, not for application developers.
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 behind your back while you are trying to have a smooth frame rate.
1990s-style OpenGL was good for the time. In 2018, OpenGL is a pile of poop.
[1] https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Legacy_OpenGL
This happens in other APIs too (we definitely had it happen with DX11), it's just that OpenGL is a lot more complicated than anything else due to its history, so it has proportionally more bugs.
What? I've written commercial games with opengl on osx/ios and my experience doesn't show that at all.
https://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/1998...
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.
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.
That's fine for a "hello triangle" program, but quickly becomes ridiculous for anything approaching a serious engine. There's a reason that glDrawArrays() has been around since 1995 (and part of the core specification since 1997).
http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/creating_an_opengl_window_(...
I wonder how much of this stuff is deprecated now.
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 reached 3%. With iOS dominating mobile revenue , Appple is the undisputed king of gaming for over a decade now.
But, don't those engines use OpenGL on the backend? They need some sort of interface to the GPU, and AFAIK, OpenGL is it for both Mac OS and Linux.
Edit: Yes, at least Unity does. I can't find an authoritative source on Unreal.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-...
Edit2: Found Unreal info...they switched to Metal in 4.14. So, you're OK if you develop games for Mac with Unreal.
I guess it's plausible that Unity will do the same going forward.
A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK.
At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities.
So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level.
Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.
Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming.
Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.
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 anywhere else. 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.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.
There are plenty great games. It help to source them from a gaming community you trust.
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
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.
Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
Having a fixed set of hardware to target is a dream.
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.
(eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
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 bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted.
Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
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.
"MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple's Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS."
It's a subset mostly for mobile.
On iOS, dunno, you probably have a point there.
It doesn't have the features you need when you're creating more complex documents. Last time I've used it it didn't even allow you to have different sections which allow you switch between the rotation of pages.
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 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.
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)
let alone the inability to reconfigure things like n-trig pens to have hover right click/middle click functionality, it's been INCREDIBLY frustrating without any communication from microsoft.
Overall it's rough, there are days where it seems better than others - but I'll randomly lose sensitivity and multiple reboots appears to be the only pseudo-consistent means of getting it back.
That being said - It's still way more usable than Photoshop/Illustrator on my Mac.
I miss 15 years ago when I had CS2 + Intuos Pro 2 and everything just worked.
As if my deteriorating keys on this machine were not bad enough. This wasn't a good WWDC for me. My PC is working great despite being an obscure setup with mismatched GPUs, can't say I understand why the graphic designer workhorse machine MBP is unusable with Illustrator and that is working just fine..
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?
I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
But it's also more difficult for the lay programmer to use as well.
OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal
I can feel the performance gains already.
Vulcan was created to get that same portability, with an API that fits modern hardware.
OpenGL 4.6 isn't anything like OpenGL 1.0/2.0 even though you can still _run_ those old OpenGL 1.0/2.0 tutorials.
You can even do most of the cool stuff of Vulkan in OpenGL via AZDO techniques (example: https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-vulkan )
Also on Windows.
Apparently, if you want to distribute your software to wide audience, you can only rely on OpenGL 3.0, with minimal set of extensions. Here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/GL3Windows#building-and-running
All the target systems had latest Windows updates, and they all run Direct3D 11 software just fine (I mostly develop for D3D and I test on them). On some systems it works in 10.1 compatibility mode, MS calls that “feature levels”. Not a big deal in practice, the majority of D3D11 stuff still works OK.
In the old link you offer as example, Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions (hence the need to downgrade the client), and fortunately obsolete. Current Intel integrated graphics have improved. And VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
Technically that’s probably true. However, if you drop support of Intel GPUs, your GL4+ software will no longer run on a huge count of older Windows laptops people are still using. For many kinds of software this is a bad tradeoff. That’s exactly why all modern browsers implement WebGL on top of Direct3D, and overwhelming majority of multi-platform games and 3D apps use D3D when running on Windows.
> VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
It’s only terrible for OpenGL. The virtual GPU driver uses host GPU to render stuff, and it runs D3D11-based software just fine. I don’t use it for gaming but it’s nice to be able to use a VM to reproduce and fix bugs in my software caused by outdated OS, windows localizations, and other environmental factors.
Intel GPUs D3D drivers have historically been better than their OpenGL ones (which isn't saying much since their D3D drivers are also trash), but now we're talking driver quality of one player which has nothing to do with the API itself or opengl somehow being outdated on windows.
But ANGLE also targets desktop OpenGL (and vulkan), and as OpenGL 4.3 adoption increases I'd expect increasingly more browsers to use it for WebGL 2.0 since you don't need translation there at all. OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0.
You seem to be pretty confused on how OpenGL versions line up with the D3D ones, too. For reference OpenGL 3.1 is roughly equivalent to D3D 10.1. When you're complaining about only getting GL 3.1, you're also complaining about being stuck with D3D 10.1
See: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Tutorial:_OpenGL_3.1_The... for a tutorial.
My Pascal-based Nvidia GPU is showing OpenGL 4.6 on Windows 10. Nothing outdated here.
I think you’re wrong here. Two reasons.
1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
2. Please read Intel’s documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... Specifically, please expand “2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors” section. As you see in that table, Intel says HD Graphics 3000/2000 only support OpenGL 3.1, which is exactly what I’m getting from the GLEW library I’m using in that project.
Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
Behavior depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
You're hitting the legacy path, that's well-defined ( https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/ARB/WGL_A... ). You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
> Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either. It still supports all the modern good stuff. And, as we've established at this point, it's not Window's stopping you from leveraging the full extent of the hardware you have. By contrast macOS does stop you from using the hardware you got to the fullest, as it's stuck on 4.1
For the systems I have in this house it’s not required, i.e. I’m getting the same OpenGL version that’s advertised by the GPU vendors.
> You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
> ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either.
Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is. And 4.0 is outdated, too (Intel Ivy Bridge). Meanwhile, modern Direct3D works fine on these GPUs, 11.0 feature level 10.1, and native 11.0, respectively.
Go read the extension I linked, it explains the behavior you're seeing. Also go read the tutorial I linked, it's using GLEW and shows you how to create a context.
You have a bug if your intention is to get a post-3.0 OpenGL context. Whether or not you care is up to you. You may be perfectly happy being in the compatibility bucket. I don't know. But you're not in the explicit 3.1 or later path.
> Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is.
Sandy Bridge is a 7 year old CPU. Of course it's outdated...? And D3D 10.1 is from 2007, it's also hugely outdated. You're getting anything more modern out of the hardware with D3D than you are OpenGL here. I don't even know what the argument you're trying to make is at this point.
GL should always work for the simple case, but instead you need to rewrite to avoid bugs in its many layers. And once you have Vulkan/Metal, industry-specific wrappers are better than the impossible to debug procedural GL junk.
Granted, this may also be true for OpenGL.
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. You get the first version of apps and games, or more polished versions of apps and games, on iOS this way.
And again, I don’t see the benefit for apple over supporting cross platform apis to encourage development. It seems like a net loss for everyone but some line in their budget on driver maintenance.
Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS.
OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released.
In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal.
And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS.
And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to.
What's going to wind up happening is more software like ANGLE (https://github.com/google/angle), MoltenVK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK), and gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx and https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability, see http://gfx-rs.github.io/2018/04/09/vulkan-portability.html for details) for providing one set of abstractions on top of several different backends.
Microsoft spread rumors that they would make OpenGL go through a compatibility layer. Everyone got scared and switched to Direct3D.
Now the Khronos group hosts their code in Github (now Microsoft). I hope they move their repos somewhere else.
windows, gnu/linux, android; and what other os?
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
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)
There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?
My answer was aimed at that part. But yeah, maybe we should define what "custom" is.
The OP's point was that the companies that make these engines can afford to invest in supporting an additional back-end API though. I think it's hard to argue that any of the companies that develop these engines would not be able to also add a Metal back-end. Many of them already work across a pretty wide range of back-ends anyway. Xbox One, PS4 and Switch all use completely different API's, for example. I think most of the work is not in adding an additional backend like Metal, but in tuning the back-end for some specific piece of hardware (NVidia vs. AMD vs. mobile GPU, etc).
Whether companies are actually willing to invest in a Metal back-end remains to be seen, but considering many of them license their engine for commerical use, I would be surprised if the major players will simply ignore Metal.
I tend to agree with Jonathan Blow's comments on Twitter, that the low-level graphics API should be just that: as low level as possible, small, focussed, and not actually intended (but still allowing!) to be used directly. Engines or higher-level API's can be built on top of that, with the option to dive down to the lowest level when needed (which will probably be a rare occasion).
DirectX will definitely not be this API because it is Windows specific. Likewise for Metal because it is Apple-specific. Blow appears to be of the opinion that Vulkan is also not moving in the right direction, because it is becoming too complex, and trying to be too many things for too many applications at the same time.
If true, in a sense, it's not that surprising Apple is doubling down on their own API. I think they should consider making the API open-source though, and develop something like MoltenVK (but the other way around) for Windows/Linux.
OP doesn't know the diminishing profits of the AAA gaming industry.
OP would never have to justify to producers and directors why <1% of gamers should take 30% or more of rendering architects time.
more people than ever do.
What's the "etc"? Are there any other engines in that set?
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.
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.
Oh wait, you can't.
Also looking at Apple's sells every year since the 6 came out, I doubt very seriously that Apple has sold more 6 phones than 6S, 7, 8, and X phones.
Also if the 6 from 2015 is not a powerhouse, neither is Samsung S8 that was just introduced last year....
http://bgr.com/2017/05/23/iphone-6s-vs-galaxy-s8-speed-test-...
Being able to run anything slightly demanding is other thing, but you can't argue there's no support.
Also, the benchmark you linked is for application load, which is heavily influenced by storage speed and load method (android has to JIT compile sometimes) and has almost no impact from the graphics' performance other than the bus between CPU/memory and GPU
[1] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/#OpenGL
Embrace. Extend. Then extinguish.
Just Replace. Extinguish.
Go back in time six years ago. What were Apple’s choices?
(1) continue to live with the deficiencies of OpenGL. Remember that, over time, it had come to fail at one of its primary purposes which was to provide efficient access to GPU hardware. Further, sticking with OpenGL would be to accept the leadership of a group that had allowed its flagship standard to falter.
(2) They could marshal their resources and create the better API that the Khronos Group wouldn’t/couldn’t.
They really had no choice. Note that Vulkan wasn’t announced until after Metal was released.
The gripes in this are should really be leveled at the Khronos group, which fumbled their stewardship of OpenGL and, with it, the chance to lead open GPU APIs.
The entire point of Mantle was to be a proof of concept that could be reworked into cross platform API (which became Vulkan), there was plenty of work already being done by Khronos in 2014 (and Apple knew this). And they just went out and released Metal anyway.
I also blame Microsoft for the same thing, early parts of the DX12 docs were taken word for word out of the Mantle docs, that's how similar they are. But Microsoft at least had couple decades of having a competing API, but Apple went out to create a new one for some reason.
It started as an AMD/Frostbyte proprietary API.
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2015/05/12/o...
AMD was basically in the same position when they started Mantle (at about the same time, no less.).
They chose differently. Now we have Vulkan. No thanks to Apple.
What developers will do is go out of thier way to support iOS and supporting the Mac is just a side benefit. Just like almost every printer company supports the Mac as a byproduct of wanting to support iOS.
I'm not sure they should have spun around and dropped Metal for Vulkan once it became available, or slow down the pace of progress til the rest of the market caught up. Doesn't make sense.
Also Apple is perhaps the largest GPU manufacturer in the world, with 200-250M GPUs shipped in 2017. That is 4-5X of Nvidia! Also Apple is investing highly in AI from tools to devices to GPUs, being able to customize may have tremendous value.
It is highly possible that Apple sees owning their interface stack as a means to keep their software-hardware warchest a couple years ahead of the competition. Which in mobile has been paying off of the last 5 years, as they constantly have crushed all others by 2-3X.
I would very much prefer games to use Metal on macOS (Starcraft2 is much smoother on the same hardware)
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/
And good luck finding a Vulkan version beyond 1.0, with extensions that work properly across all mobile devices.
http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php#android_devices
You get a spectrum all the way from 1.0.0 up to 1.0.66, with Vulkan 1.1 promised for Android P devices only.
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...
One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.
This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.
I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..
Nobody has USB-C stuff everything. Every owner is using a collection of dongles and it is absolutely stupid.
The OLED bar is also stupid.
I just hope my 2015 macbook never gets obsolete because I dislike the newer ones... and yes, I owned one, and I sold t after 2 weeks and got my 2015 back
They did, when they adopted OpenGL and OpenCL. Years ago.
Apparently they've decided that those have outlived their usefulness.
Yes, and this was so much against their DNA that it required the chutzpah of a Carmack to get the Apple's CEO to implement the decision.
Apple is and has always been a strict leech on open ecosystems.
They try to build closed proprietary stuff first to lock you to the platform, and when what they build is bested by OpenSource, embrace it and move on to the next opportunity.
They did the exact same thing with BSD: grab a beautiful piece of OpenSource tech, bolt on a metric ton of proprietary closed source tech on top of it, and call the whole thing open source to get love and applause from the OSS crowd.
Techies are essentially a gullible bunch.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17066846
https://store.steampowered.com/news/37575/
If game developers -- and game engine developers -- targeting OpenGL now are in the process of moving to target Vulkan, and if MoltenVK ends up offering better performance on macOS than Apple's legendarily anemic OpenGL stack, isn't this likely to be better in the long run despite the short-term pain?
It also doesn't come installed on my machine.
OpenGL also does not come installed on my machine.
If you care about performance it will just do something slow at uncontrollable points in the background, like copy CPU-GPU-CPU memory, synchronize against the GPU, do format conversions, etc.
If you're the one implementing GL, it's gotten gigantic again since they simplified it. GL 4.3/4.6 core has compute shaders, which means you have to implement OpenCL twice but different this time.
There's also the problem that a large chunk of OpenGL learning materials out there are hopelessly outdated, and IMO actively detrimental to learning modern graphics techniques. Judging from the types of questions I see around various forums, it seems to be VERY hard for newcomers to distinguish between "bad" and "good" OpenGL tutorials. In general, there's too much cruft for learners to focus in on the stuff that is actually part of "good OpenGL".
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.
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.