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Game Devs Express New Fears Over Future of Mac Gaming as Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS Mojave
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Same here. PS4 guy too. Building ypur own small form factor pc is cheap and very versatile.
Lol that is a truly bizarre conclusion. Twice in my life thirty years ago the Mac performed really well for gaming. Therefore it’s always been good. Basic logic not even once.
Well, yes. But the objectors don't want to build another version just for the Mac. Of course, they can build games on the iPhone, then expand them to the Mac. They want Apple to keep on using these half-measures because it's easier to transfer to the Mac after making the Windows version. Something wrong with that? Yes.
Yes - for now, Valve actually paid for the Vulkan port to Mac. One small 3rd party company is all we have at this point supporting cross platform gaming. And that's assuming Apple won't try to stop it.
You could do the conspiracy thing - Apple tends to think about 5 years out on these decisions, and they may be thinking "we'll have the best game library in the planet on Mac - console grade iOS games."
hoo I wonder why you choose the laziest and poorest implementation around, about games ported by Ferrals
Usually I'm totally down with Apple's minimalist approach to things, but I still want functional. If I can't play one of the most popular and easy to run games on the planet anymore cuz of this change there's a chink in the armor that needs buffed.
AutoCAD is already on the Mac or do you mean that Dassault wouldn't port AutoCAD to Metal?
I agree that I think the biggest lost will likely be the scientific small app development where they can't depend on platform-specific knowledge.
No serious game should have been ported to OpenGL on Mac for the past 3 years. It's disappointing that cross-platform OpenGL and Vulkan can't take off. They're interesting "concepts" but like Java the implementation failed tremendously to be a write once, compile anywhere. Much of that blame is on Apple, but it doesn't change the fact that the current implementation of the Mac OpenGL was buggy and slow.
I think people also fail to realize that having a cross-platform graphics API doesn't magically make everything work from Windows to Mac. It helps, but you still need put effort into customer support, QA, and other engineering (windowing, input, networking, etc.). Those other areas certainly aren't free, and I would imagine the rendering API being 30% of the cost of a port depending on how well abstracted it is in the code. Both UE4 and Unity support the new API and the users of those engines will likely be able to use it without a much lower cost of port since they handle a majority of the engineering themselves.
The bigger concern is that Blizzard and other porting teams seem to be having problems properly supporting Metal. There seems to be a lot of bugs that they're giving up on (removing Metal from Heroes of the Storm) or they need to only support very specific hardware (Feral only supporting AMD GPUs). If Apple can't do a better job with what they did with OpenGL the problem is even worse now.
The hope though is that Apple actually will care about the bugs in their APIs/Drivers over the bugs that they won't fix in someone else's implementations. This is actually my hope with ARM Macs. No more OS-specific drivers written by tiny Mac teams at AMD/NVidia. Apple can control and manage all of the layers of implementation hardware, drivers, OS just like they do with their A-Series mobile chips. Where in the mobile space they are best-in-class for their GPU/driver/software implementations.
No serious game should have been ported to OpenGL on Mac for the past 3 years. It's disappointing that cross-platform OpenGL and Vulkan can't take off. They're interesting "concepts" but like Java the implementation failed tremendously to be a write once, compile anywhere. Much of that blame is on Apple, but it doesn't change the fact that the current implementation of the Mac OpenGL was buggy and slow.
I think people also fail to realize that having a cross-platform graphics API doesn't magically make everything work from Windows to Mac. It helps, but you still need put effort into customer support, QA, and other engineering (windowing, input, networking, etc.). Those other areas certainly aren't free, and I would imagine the rendering API being 30% of the cost of a port depending on how well abstracted it is in the code. Both UE4 and Unity support the new API and the users of those engines will likely be able to use it without a much lower cost of port since they handle a majority of the engineering themselves.
The bigger concern is that Blizzard and other porting teams seem to be having problems properly supporting Metal. There seems to be a lot of bugs that they're giving up on (removing Metal from Heroes of the Storm) or they need to only support very specific hardware (Feral only supporting AMD GPUs). If Apple can't do a better job with what they did with OpenGL the problem is even worse now.
The hope though is that Apple actually will care about the bugs in their APIs/Drivers over the bugs that they won't fix in someone else's implementations. This is actually my hope with ARM Macs. No more OS-specific drivers written by tiny Mac teams at AMD/NVidia. Apple can control and manage all of the layers of implementation hardware, drivers, OS just like they do with their A-Series mobile chips. Where in the mobile space they are best-in-class for their GPU/driver/software implementations.
This is Apple “doubling down” on their arrogance and over-confidence. They really do seem to exist in a bubble, isolated from the realities of developers.
Good thing they still allow and (minimally) support Windows on Mac because if they ever stop that will be when I have to walk away from Mac hardware and OS X, unfortunately.
Good thing they still allow and (minimally) support Windows on Mac because if they ever stop that will be when I have to walk away from Mac hardware and OS X, unfortunately.
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I no longer use macOS on any of my company rigs. We now use Windows 10 and CentOS. Couldn't be happier.
Apple haven't updated OpenGL in several years, so it's hopelessly outdated and performs horribly. This is putting it out of its misery. Unfortunately they've chosen to replace it with a proprietary API with very little dev support. They really, really should have just gone with Vulkan. I wonder how 3D pro apps will adapt, as they're all on OpenGL.
I tried gaming briefly when I had a top end iMac a few years ago. It was a joke, to be frank. It performed far worse than my then 5 year of mid range desktop. If you want to play games then but a PC or a console.
I tried gaming briefly when I had a top end iMac a few years ago. It was a joke, to be frank. It performed far worse than my then 5 year of mid range desktop. If you want to play games then but a PC or a console.
I think they realize that desktop sales fell below 100 M and are trending toward 80 M in a few more years. As digital assistants get better the reasons for owning a desktop will become less and less and so will the revenue stream that can be achieved from desktop gaming. I don't think making iOS and Mac games cross-functional was a move for the Mac but instead was a play to get more immersive games on mobile.
Way to miss the point. The problem is that unlike openGL, Metal isn't cross platform beyond Apple products.
Anyone who says that OpenGL was “cross-platform” or enabled “cross-platform” development has never programmed with it. The API became a nightmare of legacy decisions, single vendor extensions and undefined behaviour. Effectively OpenGL on Windows and Linux became a proprietary Nvidia-only API as they have historically had the only robust drivers. AMD and Intel’s always trailed behind on features and performance sometimes being only marginally better than Apple’s. That was always a bone of contention between id and the GPU vendors as a result, and why everyone else saw sense and developed against D3D.
There is a reason Kronos made Vulkan a completely new, unrelated API and have exposed all new hardware feature development in Vulkan and not OpenGL. The message is clear: GL is legacy technology. It might not go away in big software packages anytime soon but it will continue to fall behind in terms of functionality and performance vs. Vulkan/Metal/DX12. Apple deprecating GL is merely acknowledging reality that it is time to move on.
I can’t explain Blizzard’s hassles with Metal in HotS because I have far more complicated rendering techniques running in UE4 including in Fortnite. I can understand why some Feral games are limited to AMD, because they are the only GPUs that are fast enough - all the dedicated GPUs since late 2014 have been AMD!
There is no need for the aggression, opprobrium or doom-mongering on this thread.
There is a reason Kronos made Vulkan a completely new, unrelated API and have exposed all new hardware feature development in Vulkan and not OpenGL. The message is clear: GL is legacy technology. It might not go away in big software packages anytime soon but it will continue to fall behind in terms of functionality and performance vs. Vulkan/Metal/DX12. Apple deprecating GL is merely acknowledging reality that it is time to move on.
I can’t explain Blizzard’s hassles with Metal in HotS because I have far more complicated rendering techniques running in UE4 including in Fortnite. I can understand why some Feral games are limited to AMD, because they are the only GPUs that are fast enough - all the dedicated GPUs since late 2014 have been AMD!
There is no need for the aggression, opprobrium or doom-mongering on this thread.
Well, it is more portable than DX11 and that is enough.
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They should not be deprecating anything.
MoltenVK is meant to take Vulcan and "compile it" into Metal. So it's not like that at all. You write in Vulcan, making sure to only use features that MoltenVK can translate. You don't change API. You write in Vulcan for all platforms. You still need to move away from OpenGL, yes, but if we're only talking about a cross platform solution, it works. I'm not saying it's an ideal scenario - I'm just giving silver linings
AutoCAD is Autodesk. Dassault is CATiA.
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It is similar. Vulkan is also a low level API.
How does that relate to what I said? I was arguing for platform portable code with MoltenVK and a Vulcan based implementation. Not for abstraction level
I'm not familiar enough with Cycles to know if the Open CL implementation is at feature parity with their CUDA implementation. Last I checked, it was missing big chunks of features. But I checked a while ago. I'm all in on C4d right now, so I'm not really up to speed.
The new Blender Open GL viewport is stunning, producing renders I think are amazing and good enough for a lot of work. just a shame that Apple is tossing all that out.
Wow. He didn't mince words.