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

It'll be interesting to see what developers do with Metal and Vulkan, but nothing much has changed here. Apple has been behind on OpenGL forever and now they're just making it clear that will never change. Several major game engines already use Metal. Valve seems interested in keeping their games on the Mac, so there seems to be middleware solution in development for the Source engine.

3D modeling and rendering packages all suck, and they suck harder on Mac OS (what worked in Lightwave on Windows would fail in Lightwave on Mac... same for Modo; Blender is intolerable cruelty to anyone other than hardcore geeks, and ZBrush is either the same, not as bad, or worse). There's not much to lose here either.

If developers of scientific software want to stay on the Mac, they will adapt. If they don't want to, they won't. Apple cares pretty much zero percent for small markets. We can only wait and see how it all falls into place over the next six years.
 
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Superspeed500 said:
Macs aren't built for gaming, but paying 2399$ ++ (Macbook Pro) for a computer that won't run at least a few decent games just isn't worth it. I do have a gaming desktop (Windows, but would prefer Linux if it had more games) but there are times when I want to game on the go. And the computer I usually take with me on the go is a Mac, since I prefer macOs for everything not gaming related. It isn't always an option to carry a desktop or Windows gaming laptop around.
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I don’t get gaming on a laptop but if you’re that keen why not just use bootcamp?
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bladerunner2000 said:
Apple mindset, lol. This is such a joke;
  1. First they give us barely any games
  2. Then they give us lousy ported games that run like ass
  3. Then give us outdated GPUs from years ago to run crappy ported games
  4. Then they give us mobile grade GPUs in desktops
  5. NOW they want to give us mobile games AND abandon OpenGL
It's amazing how Apple consumers don't realize they're being fleeced and if they do, they just take it. You can't have much sympathy for mac consumers.
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There can’t be many people who bought a Mac to play games. If that is even a moderate buying consideration for you you’d buy a Windows PC. Nobody has been “fleeced”.
 
OldSchoolMacGuy said:
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.
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Oh, please. Where have I ever lied about claims I've made in the past.

At best, they are cutting off the way developers want to make games in the hopes that they'll get their way. But the only people who suffer will be their own customers (as usual). And if you want to be more cynical they're doing it on purpose because they think gaming should happen on the iToys. After all Timmy can't even figure out why anyone would buy a Mac.

If USB-C ever does become a mainstream standard of course I will happily use it, but i will continue to say Apple was idiotic for eliminating USB-3 on the MBP in 2016. And to be clear, if they'd included both I'd be happy.

I don't want a DVD drive on my current laptop, but it was idiotic of Apple to eliminate them when they did. At the time USB drives were smaller than a DVD and way too expensive to give out. It caused a huge hardship at the time. I complained at the time, and I still say it was a stupid thing to do back then. But technology has moved on and DVDs aren't that useful anymore. The people who say how insightful it was of Apple are the revisionists. And it's an easy game to play; it was so smart of Apple to ditch those clunky old CRTs.

On the other hand when you pretend Apple is so progressive in cutting old tech, you really show how blind you are to Apple. In 2018 they still sell computers with spinning mechanical drives as the primary OS drive. So USB3 is so out of date they need to stop selling it, but spinning drives are okay. How do you reconcile that one in your head?
 
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OpenGL is so effing terrible and Apple's implementation is even worse. Now Apple at least has an incentive to keep Metal on the cutting edge. Deprecating OpenGL will help get developers on the same page.
 
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OldSchoolMacGuy said:
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.
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Well two reasons one : Half of all your modern games are based on OpenGL.
second its not a static technology, it is continuously evolving and an Industry standard. Apple is forcing all Game engine makers to support Metal, which is a different beast than say Opengl or DirectX. Agreed it is faster, but it is also custom. I am not sure everyone would agree and Mac will slack even further that now. Gaming companies are not in the business of making game engines but Games. Thats what sells users dont care a bit about what tech you used. Apple is being a bully here are less open. Considering there market is smaller, The only way it would work is if Apple proves it new market viability or clear superiority over DirectX and OpenGL.
 
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Classic Apple strong-arm tactics. ‘Our way, or the highway’.
This will hurt the 3D/CGI market too.
Big companies like Autodesk and Foundry might be able to afford re-tooling their code, albeit at increased delays, but many smaller developers might choose to forgo macOS versions of their software.
As an example, ‘World Creator’. I paid for a macOS license a year and a half ago, yet still they still haven’t released even as much as a beta version of the software. Devs citing problems with Metal and have put all development on hold, merrily continuing to release Windows versions.
 
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This pretty much kills games on Macs. Why? OpenG is an industry standard. I can learn to use it and then I can get my software to run and almost any platform. Having an Apple-only graphics library means that a lot of stuff is just not going to be ported to Mac.
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racerhomie said:
They can ban all 3rd party graphics libraries for all I care. As long as it brings iOS apps & games to the Mac faster.
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It won't many developers will simply abandon the Mac. I certainly don't write Mac-Only code. No I'm not a game developer. I do try to make cross-platform software.
 
OpenGL I can kind of understand—plus support was lagging for YEARS—but OpenCL isn't that old and is pretty integrated into the OS, first party apps, and keystone professional apps. Plus, Apple was a driving force behind the standard. Seems a bit premature to abandon that one.
 
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cube said:
Apple and NVIDIA only have OpenCL 1.2 . AMD has OpenCL 2.0 .
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That’s awesome, but that’s not what I’m referring to. Last I checked, the cycles renderer was missing features like certain types of shadow rendering when rendering under open cl vs when rendering under cuda (In blender) and doesn’t run at all on AMD GPU hardware in Cycles 4d.
 
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Jack Burton said:
That’s awesome, but that’s not what I’m referring to. Last I checked, the cycles renderer was missing features like certain types of shadow rendering when rendering under open cl vs when rendering under cuda (In blender) and doesn’t run at all on AMD GPU hardware in Cycles 4d.
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My point was that maybe some features are not possible or slow (perhaps even in 2.0).
 
Steve121178 said:
Who buys a Mac for gaming? If you are serious about gaming you will have a gaming rig/PS4/Xbox anyway. No one should ever expect the Mac to be a decent platform for games.
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Why does someone have to be 'serious' about gaming? I don't game much, but once in a while I'd like for my $2000 - $3000 all purpose device to be usable for general gaming without having to purchase another device which I'll barely use (looking at you, Xbox One).
 
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cube said:
My point was that maybe some features are not possible or slow (perhaps even in 2.0).
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You may be right. I guess open cL didn’t take off in a few areas i hoped they would. It failed to come together in a few spots in my workflow that were extremely disappointing as a Mac user.
 
OldSchoolMacGuy said:
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.
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something tells me you'd probably be pretty pissed off if Honda told you they couldnt support your 2014 Civic anymore. Your example is specious.
 
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marksatt said:
For my perspective I transitioned UE4 to Metal several years ago now, Unity have done the same, so the most popular game engines are already unaffected by this.

Feral and Aspyr have moved their porting libraries to Metal with my former colleagues at Feral doing a particularly impressive job as all their new titles are Metal based. Given that these two companies account for most of the proper AAA games to come to Mac this announcement doesn’t really change anything for gaming. Original developers weren’t on the Mac routinely beforehand because Mac sales simply weren’t high enough to justify the expense and that is why Feral and Aspyr have a market niche.

There are too many overreactions to this announcement - it is merely confirming what should already have been obvious. For all the whining Metal is a much easier API to port to from DX than OpenGL esp now as that GL even on PC is a dead end. All significant new development is happening on Metal, Vulkan and DX12 with GL and DX11 relegated to legacy products. As someone who has actually ported games to a Mac with GL and Metal - no one should be lamenting the death of OpenGL as Metal is simply much better.

I have more sympathy for those using scientific, CAD or CGI packages that aren’t likely to be ported to Metal. They do have a more challenging future but right now they will continue to work - GL and CL are deprecated not removed. For the future it would be possible to create an OpenGL implementation on top of Metal though there would necessarily be some trade offs, just like MoltenGL and MoltenVK, and that would allow people to continue to use GL in their legacy applications even in a future MacOS that only provides Metal natively. That should be a nice business opportunity for someone.

This is not a sign of the apocalypse.
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/ END THREAD
 
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