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macOS 10.14 to Deprecate OpenGL

posted by martyb on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-go-there dept.

Apparition writes:

Among all of the announcements by Apple at 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference today, comes the tidbit that OpenGL will be deprecated in macOS 10.14. The deprecation of OpenGL on Macs has potential implications for Linux gaming.

With news doing the rounds about the latest update to macOS, it turns out they're finally admitting they're doing nothing with their support of OpenGL and it's to be deprecated.

[...]

Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

[...] However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.

So far it's not looking good for Apple as many of the few Macintosh video game developers are raging on Twitter about this decision.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:40AM (4 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:40AM (#688798) Journal

    However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.

    Vulkan [wikipedia.org]

    Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan targets high-performance realtime 3D graphics applications such as video games and interactive media across all platforms. Compared with OpenGL and Direct3D 11, and like Direct3D 12 and Metal, Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more balanced CPU/GPU usage. Other major differences from Direct3D 11 (and prior) and OpenGL are Vulkan being a considerably lower level API and offering parallel tasking. Vulkan also has the ability to render 2D graphics applications; however, it is generally best suited for 3D. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores...
    ...

    • In contrast to Direct3D 12, Vulkan is available on multiple modern operating systems; like OpenGL, the Vulkan API is not locked to a single OS or device form factor. As of release, Vulkan runs on Android, Linux, Tizen, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 (freely licensed third-party support for iOS and macOS is also available)

    ...
    Software that supports Vulkan
    ...
    Game engines

    • Source 2 – In March 2015, Valve Corporation announced the Source 2 engine, the successor engine to the original Source engine, would support Vulkan.[60][61]
    • Serious Engine 4 – In February 2016, Croteam announced that they were supporting Vulkan in their Serious Engine.[62]
    • Torque 3D – In April 2016, the developers community announced they will include Vulkan support.[65][66]
    • Quake Engine – Vulkan support was added in July 2016.
    • id Tech 3 – Vulkan support was added in May 2017.
    • id Tech 4 – Vulkan support was added in August 2017.
    • id Tech 6 – In May 2016, id Software announced Doom, running the id Tech 6 engine, would support Vulkan.[67]
    • Xenko – Vulkan support was added in July 2016.[68]
    • Unity – The engine has support for Vulkan since version 5.6.[69]
    • CryEngine – Support for Vulkan was added in the 5.4 release.[70]
    • Intrinsic – A free and open-source cross-platform game engine that supports Vulkan.[71]
    • Unigine – In April 2017, Unigine Corp announced that Vulkan support for Unigine is in the roadmap for 2017.[72]
    • Abyss Engine – In May 2017, Deep Silver FISHLABS released Galaxy on Fire 3 on Android with Vulkan support.[73]
    • Banshee 3D – A free and open-source cross-platform game engine that supports Vulkan.[74]
    • Godot – a 2D and 3D, cross-platform, free and open-source game engine. In late February 2018, the developers announced that they will shift their focus from solely using OpenGL ES 3 to target all platforms, to instead using a combination of OpenGL ES 2 and Vulkan.[75]
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:01PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:01PM (#688806)

    Sure and we're now relying on OpenCL drivers from GPU manufacturers, think the ever diminishing number of video and graphics professionals using OSX will be happy? What happens if Apple designs their own GPU and only supports their own API? If that's not where they're going, why this move?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:10PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:10PM (#688810) Journal

      What happens if Apple designs their own GPU and only supports their own API?

      It will happen, their counter-proposal being Metal.

      But long gone are the era in which the games rode straight on top of the rendering API - today (mostly) all the game developers are using a game engine.
      Guess what? Those game engines implement a Metal framework too [wikipedia.org]

      According to Apple, more than 148,000 applications use Metal directly, and 1.7 million use it through high-level frameworks, as of June 2017.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:34PM (#688941)

        Also according to Apple, you definitely should buy more Apple products.

  • (Score: 1) by millert on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:06PM

    by millert (3626) on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:06PM (#688933) Homepage

    Presumably people will use https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ [moltengl.com] to port vulkan games to macOS (and iOS too for that matter).