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Game Devs Express New Fears Over Future of Mac Gaming as Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS Mojave

marksatt said:
You are wrong about the ease of games development. Games almost always programmed against the Direct3D API so OpenGL which is very different was a huge impediment. Metal actually makes a hell of a lot of stuff easier (and a few things harder, but such is life).

Clearly Apple aren’t Sony or Microsoft or even Nintendo in terms of embracing AAA gaming but that is a function of history and their apparent users demands.
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I am very much aware of how games are developed, I know that the vast majority of games are DirectX, and I know that Metal is a better API than OpenGL. The point is that Mac will no longer get games that were written with OpenGL support in the first place (All id and Valve games for example), further reducing its already-awful potential game library. A lot of modern console games also use an API that is very similar to OpenGL so this makes console ports even less likely than they already were.
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shadowmatt said:
Not sure you do. OpenGL is being replaced by Vulcan which is in essence a really optimised version of OpenGL, rebuilt and redesigned to free up the CPU and work with newer technologies, but in itself doesn't offer any new GPU features over OpenGL.

Vulcan is also replacing OpenCL as it doesn't need to 'render' anything like OpenGL, it can just to calculations when required.

The alternative is that Apple finally start supporting OpenGL + CL latest releases just as other parts of the gaming world are moving to different APIs.
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To be honest Apple never supported Vulkan in the first place so I guess dropping OpenGL support doesn’t even really matter anymore for new games. Lots of legacy games will stop working though.
 
shadowmatt said:
OpenGL is being replaced by Vulcan which is in essence a really optimised version of OpenGL, rebuilt and redesigned to free up the CPU and work with newer technologies, but in itself doesn't offer any new GPU features over OpenGL.
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OpenGL and Vulkan are completely different things. No such replacement.
 
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kruegdude said:
Isn’t there some metal based software that does what blender does?
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Add one qualifier to that: "for free." I'm not sure there is a Blender replacement that doesn't cost $$$.

I would be quite interested to learn what the blender foundation thinks about this. Will they drop Mac support? Or go all in with metal, but just lag behind as they look for developers to take on that task?

I don't know if the blender GPU renderer, Cycles (not the realtime viewport) even supports Open CL on Mac. 3rd party implementations of Cycles (like Cycles 4d for Cinema 4d) don't yet.

Now, I think, they never will.
 
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What is Apple doing? Metal is great but it’s really only being fully used on iOS not macOS games. Macs make up a tiny percentage of gamers and many devs will not want to waste time porting with Metal instead of OpenGL which is compatible with every platform. Until Apple ships powerful GPUs stock, Metal will never have the sort of support DirectX has enjoyed for 2 decades.
 
cube said:
OpenGL and Vulkan are completely different things. No such replacement.
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Not yet, but it will be pushed. AMD cards don't do as well compared to Nvidia with OpenGL, AMD needs Vulcan games to compete. Their cards were essentially designed for where Vulcan came from.

Developers will want the CPU boost and when the cards that can't support it are no longer targeted I can't see new games and software using OpenGL over Vulcan.
 
Jack Burton said:
Add one qualifier to that: "for free." I'm not sure there is a Blender replacement that doesn't cost $$$.

I would be quite interested to learn what the blender foundation thinks about this. Will they drop Mac support? Or go all in with metal, but just lag behind as they look for developers to take on that task?

I don't know if the blender GPU renderer, Cycles (not the realtime viewport) even supports Open CL on Mac. 3rd party implementations of Cycles (like Cycles 4d for Cinema 4d) don't yet.

Now, I think, they never will.
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Ah. It just seemed odd to totally switch to another os which, in the case of Windows, would cost money rather than pony up that money for a Mac app.

Since Blender is open source there’s got to be someone that’ll port it :)
 
cube said:
Pixelmator does not care about anything but Apple.
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It doesn’t matter since the context is that it’s an issue of indie developers that are going to be worse off. I suspect they’re more flexible that the big software houses.
 
lunarworks said:
I don't understand why Apple can't support OpenGL/CL and Vulkan alongside Metal.

It's fine for iOS, where developers are used to doing things Apple's way and only Apple's way, but the desktop is a whole other beast.
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Yep. It’s extra work for little reward. How many people actually buy AAA titles on the Mac App Store? Not many. Most use Steam through Bootcamp or have a PC for gaming instead.
 
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kruegdude said:
It doesn’t matter since the context is that it’s an issue of indie developers that are going to be worse off. I suspect they’re more flexible that the big software houses.
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A multiplatform indie developer would be less flexible if they write their own engine.
 
I bought several iMacs over the past years. Always the top models with the beefiest graphic card. Could I Play any decent games with them. Of course not. I lost all hope that Tim Cooks Apple will ever produce a Mac that is powerfull enough that developers will produce and release serious games for it like they do it for the Windows platform. I'll go back to Windows and maybe buy a cheap mac for media consumption and internet browsing.

Very sad. I just can't understand the reasoning behind many of the decisions of Tim Cooks Apple like I did during Steves time.
 
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To those saying that Apple doesn't care about gaming: of course it does. It doesn't tailor itself to, or sell itself on its gaming prowess, but it cares. Apple likes money, and the gaming industry was valued at $18.4 billion in 2017. They just see other things as being of greater priority.
 
69Mustang said:
It should be pretty clear to you by now, most are referencing real games, not iOS titles. Mac gamers want access to the same AAA title PC gamers can access. Also want those games in a comparable time frame, not 2, 3, or 4 years later.
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I do wonder, though, for AAA game titles that have been ported to the Mac after initial release on Windows, or are written by their developers as cross-platform from the start... how many of those use OpenGL, vs. simply being written on top of Unity or similar engines? How many games are being written using OpenGL, for Windows, in order that they can run with minimal rewriting on macOS? How many are being written (recently) with in-house-developed dual backends, for both DirectX and OpenGL? If they're written on top of Unity or something like it, then said framework "merely" needs to be changed to work on top of Metal rather than on top of OpenGL (if they haven't already). Metal, as I understand it, has the advantage of getting software closer to the hardware.

The more clear loss would appear to be OpenCL. Though the scientists I know would much rather have proper Nvidia support on the Mac, so they could use various scientific software that can take advantage of Cuda to do (entirely non-graphical) scientific calculation/simulation work much more quickly.
 
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StellarVixen said:
Do you even read what you write? Where is the Apple's fault in all of this? How it is Apple's fault that "Blizzard Entertainment" has bad devs, who cannot or do not want to even make the game properly?
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Blizzard spent as much time and effort as they think Apple OS is worth. Since Apple is dropping support of game engines I imagine Blizzard will drop any pretense of supporting Mac’s. Because I am willing to bet they won’t be the only game developer to do so it’s people who support Mac gaming that will lose the most. Apple losing game support will barely hurt the developers, might hurt Apple to a very small degree short term but will decimate the Mac gaming community.
 
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cube said:
A multiplatform indie developer would be less flexible if they write their own engine.
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You are straying from the original point for some reason. My point of contention with the statement made is that I think that small, independent, development teams are more flexible than big software shop development teams.
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aidler said:
I bought several iMacs over the past years. Always the top models with the beefiest graphic card. Could I Play any decent games with them. Of course not. I lost all hope that Tim Cooks Apple will ever produce a Mac that is powerfull enough that developers will produce and release serious games for it like they do it for the Windows platform. I'll go back to Windows and maybe buy a cheap mac for media consumption and internet browsing.

Very sad. I just can't understand the reasoning behind many of the decisions of Tim Cooks Apple like I did during Steves time.
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The iMac Pro kicks a$$ and has eGPU support.
 
napabar said:
You guys are forgetting that Apple is creating a unified program for developing apps on the iOS and macOS. There are many metal games on the iOS that can now easily come over to the Mac.

You've just got to abandon the old school way of thinking how Mac games are made.
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LOL iOS games.
 
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