I feel so enlightened. Thank you for giving me some interesting reading material.
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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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https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/490mjr/not_sure_the_original_source_but_im_31_years_old/
Apple has really fooled big time render app developers with whole OpenCL thing. Many of them went into parallel development of CUDA and OpenCL in order not to leave the Mac market and look at them now... How naiver they were. Premiere Pro even dropped CUDA in favor of OpenCL, they were really banking on becoming a replacement to Final Cut Pro. Oh you silly Adobe now onto the Metal quick! Good luck with your OpenCL on PC!
Man Apple really does not understand the gaming industry... Nobody is going to go out of their way to make their games work with Metal - at least before if the game already worked in OpenGL it wasn’t much work to port over.
I assume unity and UE are going to support metal and not much else, so those are the only games we might get from here on out, if developers even feel like taking the time.
I assume unity and UE are going to support metal and not much else, so those are the only games we might get from here on out, if developers even feel like taking the time.
OpenGL is outdated, given they are transitioning to a new API called Vulkan. They are very different in their implementation, with Vulkan closer to Metal 2 than OpenGL.
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.
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.
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.
You mean that old school way of taking the best/most popular games on the much more popular openGL PC platform and being able to port those in a straightforward way ?
Lots of cross platform FOSS CAD tools will no longer be portable to the Mac without serious work from unpaid developers that are already getting disillusioned with Apple
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They are not transitioning. One does not replace the other.
Throw away OpenCL / GL and adapt Vulkan... but in all honesty they could have had them all. We all know it's because they want to force everyone to use Metal. It's kinda a "no airjack"-move to force adaption.
You are wrong about the ease of games development. Games are 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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Yeah assuming Molten works as advertised, at worst we're looking at a lateral move for Mac users compared to the old days where you had to use Apple's outdated OpenGL spec. Metal being on the fantastically popular iOS devices gives us a continually updated and more resource-efficient API for people who want to use it, and for everything else there will be Molten.
Yeah, niche third party renderers and simulation tools seem like the bigger losers rather than games in this situations.
That said, I doubt Apple is going to strip out OpenGL support entirely in 10.15—they deprecated Quicktime 7 years ago and it's only just now going to have its last supported release. I imagine we've got a few years of compatibility for older titles.
When talking about Apple's moves hurting gaming on the Mac, their OpenGL/Metal moves are far less damaging than not updating their machines with standard GPUs.
Also, while I agree as a company Apple doesn't "understand" games, trying to compete with the gaming PC market would be a fools errand. The people who build their own towers aren't going to settle for Apple's machines.
Unity and Unreal support Metal 2 so there shouldn't be any real issued for anyone working with those technologies.
Engines are built to scale, PC ones always have and as the target build is PS4 / XBox One for a lot of companies they stand to lose nothing in terms of supporting another platform.
Smaller companies which developed their own engine may not wish to port their game. They could use a Metal wrapper which gives decent results.
I was like a week from selling my Windows gaming PC and buying an eGPU and now...idk what to do again lol. This 2 computer solution sucks tho I was looking for a 1 computer solution, and I'd rather have a way to game easier on Mac than go Windows (which I dislike) and use Premiere Pro instead of FCPX (which I also don't enjoy)
Yea, I understand that. I am only going by the data and what people are predicting. It's all garbage to me.
Khronos is preparing a subset of Vulkan and mapping libraries to DX12 and Metal.
Would be totally down with that if Safari didn't still have so many weird shortcomings all over the place still. Not playing 4K on YouTube, having to click the share button on a video 3 times for the pop up instead of once in Chrome, Twitch acting a bit goofy in Safari with slow video starts and auto mutes (even tho the second seems to be fixed now) I find all kinds of goofy little issues in Safari that just shouldn't be happening, and the lack of 4K on YouTube just sucks. For a company pushing 4K with Apple TV and high resolutions screens it seems antithetical.
History has shown that Apple grows by leaps and bounds when they adopt open or widely used standards. But Cook's Apple thinks they can just do away with standards because everyone wants to use Apple hardware, which is just not true.
This is just another nail in the coffin of macOS.
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.