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

[lJoSquaredl]

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.

The fact that I only really play Blizzard games and League of Legends which are very popular games and extremely easy to run in general...and I may not even be able to play those games on Mac? That just hurts, it's not like I'm demanding much from Apple here, I can run League with the fans almost not even turning on it's so easy to run, and still I may have it taken away lol. Meanwhile Fortnite will probably be able to run on both MacOS and iOS and I honestly couldn't care less for that game.

 

[Shivetya]

so basically reduce the number of people willing to write games for mac to make it simpler to drop Intel support completely and take to a platform they have permanent 100% control over.

 

[marksatt]

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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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.

No games are going to stop running due to the deprecation of OpenGL. Deprecation means that developers see a warning when compiling but the libraries still function as before. Older games will stop working when 32bit support is removed but that is separate.

All console APIs are designed to be D3D like or even lower level. None are GL like, I don’t know where that nonesense myth keeps coming from but it is complete and utter rubbish. I would use stronger language if I could.

Also you were going to get id games once Activision sold them to Bethesda/ZeniMax regardless of OpenGL as neither Aspyr nor Feral have been able to convince Bethesda/ZeniMax to license games for porting. Apart from Quake 3 all id games were ported to Mac by third parties, not id themselves.

Valve are the reason MoltenVK is now freely available so I suggest they would use that for future Mac support. Again you aren’t losing anything from them as far as anyone can know today.

 

[CWallace]

And? macOS doesn’t support Vulkan and MoltenVK is far too slow to be viable.

The folks behind Vulkan announced earlier this year they will be bringing it to macOS on their own accord so it doesn't matter that Apple does not formally support it.

 

[aidler]

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?

It's a problem for me as a player/consumer when I can no longer play the games I own on my Mac and THAT is a problem for Apple.

 

[niun]

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.

Not always the case. Less time, cash, bods etc to throw at porting to different OS. Creating a game for any platform isn't exactly a walk in the park in the first place .

 

[Toutou]

I agree with the AAA-gaming-on-a-MacBook thing, but this also ****s up Minecraft and dozens of old-but-gold games.

 

[aidler]

The iMac Pro kicks a$$ and has eGPU support.

Thanks but I forgot to mention "affordable" in my last posting. The iMac Pro isn't a gaming machine. That would be totaly overpower and I could probably buy two or three windows PCs for it. Sadly there seem to be no middleground.

 

[Petetastic]

The future of Apple: fewer choices, increased prices, less flexibility, features we don’t care about, and keyboards that don’t work.

And watch bands.

Why don’t they just take a dump on the stage during the keynotes?

 

[groadyho]

BTW, are they still designing the promised “modular Mac Pro”? For what exactly? For playing the iOS version of Angry Birds? Do they really mean that we would tell our research department to consider buying a Mac Pro for coding in Metal? Really? And this Tim Cook guy says now he no longer has an interest in politics? He should reconsider that, as has even less interest in computers.

No serious gamer uses a Mac anyway. Heck most regular everyday people don't use or need a Mac. Why pay 2-5k to surf the web or check email. My wife needs full office compliment for work and refuses to use a Mac for that. Mac will never gain ground at their price point anyway. It is all a moot point. The only thing Apple is doing is ensuring a guy like me who uses a custom pc for games and entertainment and 8yr old HP with win10 for work will never buy a Mac. Btw, I must laugh at everyone who says but we can play IOS games, they are not the same. Have fun playing war wings with lag or plants vs zombies.

 

[star-affinity]

This means that apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will still run in Mojave, but they will no longer be updated after macOS 10.14 launches.

I'm a bit confused – what is it that won't be updated? The apps or OpenGL and OpenCL? OpenGL hasn't received an update from Apple since OS X 10.9 Mavericks (where we got version 4.1 while the latest version is 4.5) as far as I know – so nothing new there. OpenCL I'm not sure, but I don't think that has been getting much love either, or? So what's different in MacOS Mojave then?

Anyway – here’s my (rather long, sorry…) thoughts on the situation:

Moving away from OpenGL is one thing, but not having its successor Vulkan in MacOS is a bit sad as far as I can see. Hopefully MoltenVK can help a bit on that – converting Vulkan to Metal – but there seems to be some drawbacks – one of them being losing a bit of performance.

It seems to me that while Metal probably will (does) serve Apple's platforms well (and more and more so in the coming years) that other operating system known as Windows has OpenGL 4.5, Microsoft's DirectX with Direct3D (used for the majority of game titles) and Vulkan. Linux has OpenGL and Vulkan.

Developing using Metal will seemingly require some dedication on the game developers part and if we don't see a big increase in the amount of people having powerful “desktop class” graphics cards connected to (or in) their Macs – which might happen now with support for external GPUs – I guess most developers of “big” game titles will continue to focus on Windows. That’s also where the graphic card vendors put most of their effort when it comes to drivers, even doing specific driver optimisation for new game titles.

But like has been mentioned, game engines such as Unreal and Unity has Metal support and as long as those engines are being used a Mac version shouldn’t be too far fetched – but at the same time there’s quite a few other graphics engines out there too...

A different story are the iOS game titles that down the road relatively easily could get a MacOS version according to Apple’s recent announcements. But those titles will (in the short term at least) most probably not match the sophistication of most so called “triple A titles” (AAA) released for consoles and Windows. At the same time porting houses such as Feral and Aspyr is doing a good job bringing some modern PC/console titles to MacOS.

I guess we’ll see what happens…

 

[Brammy]

https://www.macgamerhq.com/guides/macos-metal-games/

So, is it safe to assume the Steam version of Cities: Skyline for the Mac uses Metal?

 

[VoR]

And? macOS doesn’t support Vulkan and MoltenVK is far too slow to be viable.

Compared to what? Apple’s OpenGL drivers have always been pitifully slow, MoltonVK may not be native but from what (very) little I’ve seen, it’s looking much faster.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dota2-mac-vulkan&num=1

 

[Brammy]

No serious gamer uses a Mac anyway. Heck most regular everyday people don't use or need a Mac.

Most of my gaming I do on PS4, but WoW and a few other games I play on my Mac. I also have an Alienware Alpha R1. I think at some point I will end up with another small form-factor PC.

 

[cube]

Moving away from OpenGL is one thing, but not having its successor Vulkan in MacOS is a bit sad as far as I can see.

OpenGL and Vulkan are parallel tracks.

 

[e-coli]

There goes the Pro market. Good luck running 3D apps or After effects without Open GL or Open CL. Unbelievable.

 

[john123]

Why do some think old technology should be supported forever? At some point you have to cut it loose. If you require it, then don't upgrade. Sorry kids. This is how the world works. Even Honda doesn't support your '84 Civic with new parts like fenders anymore.

That’s a terrible analogy and you know it.

“Old and barely used” are not the same as “old and used by a chunk of people.”

 

[cube]

That’s a terrible analogy and you know it.

“Old and barely used” are not the same as “old and used by a chunk of people.”

And "old" is not the same as "old and evolving".

 

[miscend]

The fact is you will still have port your code to Metal when you make iOS versions of your games. Phones and tablets are a huge market for games. That means all the major third party code bases and all the major game engines are getting ported to Metal anyway. Unreal Engine, Cryengine and Unity etc they will all support metal.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

No we don't. That is like telling a programmer to write in C instead of Java.
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No.

Yes, Vulkan is the successor. In fact, Khronos is merging Vulkan with OpenCL via SPIR-V ala to mirror what Apple did inventing Metal API and further with Metal 2 API.

 

[cube]

The fact is you will still have port your code to Metal when you make iOS versions of your games. Phones and tablets are a huge market for games.

You can still use OpenGL ES and MoltenVK for iOS.
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Yes, Vulkan is the successor. In fact, Khronos is merging Vulkan with OpenCL via SPIR-V ala to mirror what Apple did inventing Metal API and further with Metal 2 API.

Vulkan does not replace OpenGL. It serves the same purpose as Metal, but more portably.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

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.

Blender has OpenCL support. AMD has been helping them too.

Here’s what Tons had to say about deprecation news:

Apple has't been a good platform for 3D creatives for many years. It's not a real surprise they drop OpenGL support. We don't know yet how to solve this for Blender. But as you know, we're really good in keep supporting crippled old platforms!

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

You're missing the point. It's not about being "old technology"--it's the convenience of it. In the past, devs have been able to compile for both Mac and PC easily due to the old solution being cross-platform and open source. The fact now that they can't do that anymore is causing a lot of game devs to stop and question whether the extra time needed to compile a game for Mac is worth it.

As we've seen for years, it's so easy to bring games to the Mac platform by simply compiling the cross-platform solution that macOS gets the same games those on Windows do, 3+ years later.
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Sure they shouldn't keep legacy hardware around forever, but Apple the past few years is all about killing features that are still in mainstream use and offering little to compensate.

Metal and Vulcan aren't in common use and are not well liked by the dev community. So here we have Apple breaking a huge number of modern apps and telling their customers they need to get the developers to rewrite them with a half-baked API.

Just as they should not have killed off standard USB 3 ports 2-3 years ago, when still have 98%+ market share in 2018.

Just like they shouldn't have killed off magsafe to replace it with a fragile plug for power that is not nearly as good on any level.

And please spare us your 287,000th rehash about floppy drives and parallel ports. Nobody is arguing in 2018 that those are modern tech. Apple was also right to kill off low res black and white CRTs even though they were 10 years late on that one.

As for your car analogy, it's so grossly flawed it doesn't deserve a response.

Apple has a history of pushing to move to better standards. You seem totally blind to it right now. I'm sure you'll be trumpeting the success as if you were always fan in the future. Looking back, you've certainly done it in the past.

 

[VictorTango777]

Is it appropriate for people who criticize Microsoft for their proprietary technologies such as DirectX to turn around and defend Apple's use of Metal?

 

[EdT]

What type of programs is the Mac line a better choice than Windows? Graphics? Lots of people posting here say that with high end processors and GPU Windows is more flexible there. Video editing? Maybe 6-8 years ago but today most equipment connects to a Win box more easily and cheaply than to a Mac. Desktop Publishing? Let’s cut to the chase and admit any high end graphic program is going to benefit more from advanced GPU’s and higher speed processors, so just about anything like photo editing or page layout and design can be done on a Windows machine either as well or better than a Mac.

So other than brand loyalty what functionality or software exists either solely on the Mac or where it’s so much better on Mac OS than Windows? 10 years ago there were lots of fields where Mac was better. Now? There may be programs that are better on a Mac but it’s no longer by a huge amount. And hardware always did favor Windows. I bought a 2016 iMac 2+ years ago. I’m having trouble finding video equipment that easily integrates with it and video sources-at least at high resolutions- and editing makes it howl as the cooling fans kick in.

So what field should a hobbyist be interested in where buying a Mac would be far and away the best choice? Going through this thread made me look at what and why I’m buying a Mac computer. I’m not happy with Windows 10 as an OS but anymore I’m not happy with Mac OS either.