Apple Depreciates OpenGL and OpenCL in MacOS

Simmonz said:
Last Steam hardware survey had Mac at 3.07%. Last number of users Valve talked about was 125 million users. That makes roughly 3.83 million Mac users just on Steam. That's quite a few dozen. School system must be shit wherever you live. Need to up the math skills.
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Thank you for taking the time to point out, in fact, there are more than a few dozen MAC gamers world wide. You really made me look dumb!
 
leathco016 said:
Other companies have gotten away with this. They company that makes Cards Against Humanity sold a product calleed Bull$hit, and people bought it up. It actually sold out, because people thought that they were getting an exclusive card for the game. They literally got a box of bull feces.

Proof: http://time.com/3634443/cards-against-humanity-poop-black-friday/
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And how is that relevant? A one-off scam, vs a company that keeps making badly engineered failing products that are overpriced and people still come back to them for seconds.
 
bigdogchris said:
Thank you for taking the time to point out, in fact, there are more than a few dozen MAC gamers world wide. You really made me look dumb!
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I won't take all the credit, you did most of the work yourself.

Lakados said:
All the games you listed there are already using the Metal API for their Mac versions. And it looks like the vast majority of MacOS steam titles are too.
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Which has nothing to do with the comment I replied to saying Mac wasn't relevant to gaming.
 
All this does is make it prohibitively expensive for indie studios to port their OpenGL games to the mac platform. But then again, if they're switching to their own in-house CPU/GPUs, they've already made up their minds on enthusiast gaming.
 
nutzo said:
And forced change can be expensive.
Not everyone has the resources to rewrite apps or replace expensive equipment just because the OS vendor doesn't want to support an old API.
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than I argue your business model is wrong and your will die anyways. Apple is just help you along faster than you want to be dead

Also. I'm sorry you no longer have flash on your device(s)
 
The_Capulet said:
All this does is make it prohibitively expensive for indie studios to port their OpenGL games to the mac platform. But then again, if they're switching to their own in-house CPU/GPUs, they've already made up their minds on enthusiast gaming.
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I disagree. Most indie devs like iOS as a platform because of the money it brings assuming their game is decent. They would have already had to use Metal as an API anyways if wanting it on iOS, and it'll be no different given that the desktop platform is likely converging.

This doesn't hurt game devs IMO. Who this hurts are small developers of science applications.
 
Mchart said:
I disagree. Most indie devs like iOS as a platform because of the money it brings assuming their game is decent. They would have already had to use Metal as an API anyways if wanting it on iOS, and it'll be no different given that the desktop platform is likely converging.

This doesn't hurt game devs IMO. Who this hurts are small developers of science applications.
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Sorry, but you are wrong on this one. There are game companies who have little interests in trying to support two different ports of their game when Apple sales are pretty small anyway, even on a good day.

Food for thought; If the current game is still using OpenGL, on an Apple computer, then it is a safe bet those games are not going to be ported to another API.
 
BSmith said:
Sorry, but you are wrong on this one. There are game companies who have little interests in trying to support two different ports of their game when Apple sales are pretty small anyway, even on a good day.

Food for thought; If the current game is still using OpenGL, on an Apple computer, then it is a safe bet those games are not going to be ported to another API.
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And yet it'll still work anyways. They aren't dropping OpenGL support completely. They're just not putting future versions of the API in.

So old games still work and new games developed for OSX will have to use the Metal API - Which most major game engines these days have native support for anyways.
 
Orddie said:
than I argue your business model is wrong and your will die anyways. Apple is just help you along faster than you want to be dead

Also. I'm sorry you no longer have flash on your device(s)
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The Molten API can take the native GL and CL commands and converts them into Metal, you simply add it as a wrapper and is mostly automated, while it does not give the performance of naively coding in Metal it does show an average of a 3x performance increase over its native CL or GL code. Its' developers claim it is a very fast and easy conversion.
 
M76 said:
Nothing seems to harm them. Tthey could hand out a turd in a box, and people would still come back to them cuz apple!
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hey, now, it's going to be the most elegantly packaged turd on the planet, and it comes with a cool apple sticker!
 
Simmonz said:
I won't take all the credit, you did most of the work yourself.



Which has nothing to do with the comment I replied to saying Mac wasn't relevant to gaming.
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Your sarcasm was clear in your post its intended target was not so when I made the post it was because I didn't know if you were agreeing with him and mocking Apple or disagreeing with him and pointing out that some AAA titles were already there and they are used. So it was more for clarification, as I know a few Mac Gamers and right now they are more panicked over how it will effect EvE as they are convinced that CCP will not put the work into the mac client.
 
Mchart said:
And yet it'll still work anyways. They aren't dropping OpenGL support completely. They're just not putting future versions of the API in.

So old games still work and new games developed for OSX will have to use the Metal API - Which most major game engines these days have native support for anyways.
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The nature of deprecation is to announce no more support for it, with the goal to eventually drop it altogether, It is a safe bet developers, who are still using OpenGL in a game for an Apple computer will no longer be supporting that effort and will not be moving over to Metal. If they were going to do that, then they would have already done so.

Supporting games, natively, on Apple computers has always been a risky proposition due to the small marketshare they hold in the desktop market. OpenGL was a safer bet as it is supported in Windows also, which made it less costly to support. If a game did well enough the developer might have decided to go ahead with a Metal port, if it did not do well enough to cover the cost of support and migration, then it stayed with OpenGL. When OpenGL goes bye-bye on Apple computers, those game still using OpenGL will no longer be available. The games that are still using OpenGL will no longer get any updates. It is a simple business decision.
 
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Mchart said:
You don't think one of the worlds largest companies who are developing their own CPU/GPU architectures didn't think that far?
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Hehe, size and money have nothing to do with it. In fact sometimes it can work against you... It might be part of some awesome strategy that works great, or metal might have been an independent project from way before that has been working fine and now they want software makers to commit even more to Apple, without thinking about what the hardware team is doing and shit like that... But all that said if this API is something that works with iphone as well as their PCs then awesome... If i was a software company, i would think long and hard to commit more to apple than anything else... Specially something like a tool or a productivity tool... Apple are assholes that will kiss your ass one minute, and screw you over the next.
 
cyclone3d said:
That Apple with a bite out of it that they have kept around must have grown some mind-altering mold that sent spores into the air and all the people in charge of design and advertising have been affected by it for at least a couple years now.
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That's the Apple "Ergot" Tech that I've been hearing about.
 
My problem with this is that Apple’s compute library nomenclature, terminology for non graphics compute work loads. The terminology/process is all strictly shader based which bothers me because it feels like I've been sent back in time to that point where I had to force something to work on an architecture that is not made for this. (Early Compute.)

I've been having lunch with a former Apple Engineer (Very cool guy) who continues to work on Metal and shaders. We've had this discussion. I believe he said "this is not what that's for" at the time when discussing compute work loads. He really liked my ideas for compute work loads. I found it funny that some of these ideas weren't new; some were demo'd by AMD. (Spreadsheet demo.)

I have to say, I really don't like how Apple talks as if what they showed at this event is all there is to do with compute and that everything is functionally completely. Their comparisons of Metal versus their neglected ancient implementation of OpenCL also bothers me. They put up a wall of all these wonderful things for the unwashed masses that don't look beyond. It's like they're ignoring the scientific/research/university and just plain good ole'geeks pushing compute to do awesome stuff.

However, this is probably beating a dead horse and the point maybe moot.. During my graduate days (2014-2016) I saw more and more graduates/scientist/researchers running gamer laptops (Asus was popular) with Linux or Apple Macs with AMD GPUS + Windows. I know for my project group we eventually said "Fuck this" trying to get our kernel code going on MBP 13" with Intel iGPU.
 
Lakados said:
Here is a list of the hardware that already supports Metal as well as the list of software already using it. After looking at that, I’m pretty sure Apple is confident that anybody who will be using 10.14 is already using the newer versions of that software. Metal has been their official graphics API since 2014 that’s a solid 4 years of them telling developers that this was coming and it looks like most of them got the hint.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)
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They are better off than I was expecting.
 
Wait, why isn't S3 rising up from the ashes to sue them for using the Metal API? Or, am I missing something, and this actually has some roots in that? (Honestly haven't followed Metal at all...)
 
As much as Apple thinks they're doing the best thing for their platform, they really aren't. Vulkan on Ubuntu is faster than Vulkan->Metal on Mac. A lot of developers are going to implement this wrapper to avoid having the need to learn how to work with Metal. It won't be as good as pure Vulkan or pure Metal, and nobody is going to develop for Metal unless it's on a iPhone.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dota2-mac-vulkan&num=2
 
BSmith said:
The nature of deprecation is to announce no more support for it, with the goal to eventually drop it altogether, It is a safe bet developers, who are still using OpenGL in a game for an Apple computer will no longer be supporting that effort and will not be moving over to Metal. If they were going to do that, then they would have already done so.

Supporting games, natively, on Apple computers has always been a risky proposition due to the small marketshare they hold in the desktop market. OpenGL was a safer bet as it is supported in Windows also, which made it less costly to support. If a game did well enough the developer might have decided to go ahead with a Metal port, if it did not do well enough to cover the cost of support and migration, then it stayed with OpenGL. When OpenGL goes bye-bye on Apple computers, those game still using OpenGL will no longer be available. The games that are still using OpenGL will no longer get any updates. It is a simple business decision.
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Again - You'd be right if their desktop platforms stayed seperate from mobile.

With this announcment along with the announcment that Apple is planning to move to their own architecture for the Mac lineup in 2020 I think it's pretty obvious that the platforms are converging which would mean that developing for Mac is no longer developing for a small marketshare. Your software will potentially run on all the handhelds and Mac product lines with little effort besides dealing with mobile specific input considerations.
 
Uvaman2 said:
Hehe, size and money have nothing to do with it. In fact sometimes it can work against you... It might be part of some awesome strategy that works great, or metal might have been an independent project from way before that has been working fine and now they want software makers to commit even more to Apple, without thinking about what the hardware team is doing and shit like that... But all that said if this API is something that works with iphone as well as their PCs then awesome... If i was a software company, i would think long and hard to commit more to apple than anything else... Specially something like a tool or a productivity tool... Apple are assholes that will kiss your ass one minute, and screw you over the next.
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This will only increase profits for any Mac and/or iOS developer given the convergence of the platforms, and as previously stated Apple doesn't make it difficult to convert API's.
 
1.) I think the word you are looking g for is "deprecate" not "depreciate"

2.) That will certainly make porting more difficult. A lot of Linux and Mac ports of games only exist because the combined Mac and Linux volume make sense for the port, as they are similar enough to save a lot of work.

Yank OpenGL out of MacOS and that could change.

Apple never cared about games on their devices though.
 
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Mchart said:
Again - You'd be right if their desktop platforms stayed seperate from mobile.

With this announcment along with the announcment that Apple is planning to move to their own architecture for the Mac lineup in 2020 I think it's pretty obvious that the platforms are converging which would mean that developing for Mac is no longer developing for a small marketshare. Your software will potentially run on all the handhelds and Mac product lines with little effort besides dealing with mobile specific input considerations.
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That is pure speculation at this point. I have no doubt they will converge, but there are far too many unknowns right now. And right now is when the decisions have to be made.

Compounded by this fact; Most desktop games are not capable of running on a phone, simply due to the inputs required. So you are not going to be sitting in an airport playing some AAA desktop title on your phone. Therefore, you are still stuck with desktop market penetration as the gating factor.

The best business decision is to wait and see what happens, but for those game using OpenGL today, they are not going to be putting out further updates after this announcement and those games will no longer get any support from the developer. It makes no sense to do so.
 
Its their architecture and hardware so they can do what they want, but on the other side of the coin, this is another powerful tech company squeezing customers down their own proprietary route like it or not !!
 
I think a lot of developers have been using Metal for a few years anyway. It's been better supported than OpenGL and the likes for quite some time. Xcode is optimized for it.
But, Apple has never cared about games. Not sure how true it is, but supposedly Steve Jobs was annoyed over all of the games and fart apps. Talk about a buzz kill. C'Mon, the first fart app was amusing...
Ever watch a keynote when one of the VP's talks about an iOS game? They are so fake! "That looks like fun!"
 
viper1152012 said:
I thought they only make phones.... They make computers now?
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Actually that's why they are dropping OpenGL and OpenCL and moving to Metal. OpenGL is too heavy for mobile, so why support both.

The writing has been on the wall for OpenGL for some time, even before Metal was introduced a few years ago. Will it really matter in the Mac app market? Probably not. It will be telling if Adobe adopts or not. Then again you would think they would be able to eliminate their 32 bit apps long before now too...
 
Is it me, or nowadays things in the software side seen more fluid and more apt to change than the 90s, early 2000s ? Does this have to do with the decline of the wintel empire? Maybe im crazy.
 
Uvaman2 said:
Is it me, or nowadays things in the software side seen more fluid and more apt to change than the 90s, early 2000s ? Does this have to do with the decline of the wintel empire? Maybe im crazy.
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It has a lot more to do with how people do their jobs now and where the money is. Software is being forced to be more fluid, pair it up with many of the higher level languages C# and cleaner API’s like Metal or Vulkan with better practices enforced by the tools like VisualStudio and you can get a lot done a lot faster than a decade ago.
 
DocNo said:
Actually that's why they are dropping OpenGL and OpenCL and moving to Metal. OpenGL is too heavy for mobile, so why support both.

The writing has been on the wall for OpenGL for some time, even before Metal was introduced a few years ago. Will it really matter in the Mac app market? Probably not. It will be telling if Adobe adopts or not. Then again you would think they would be able to eliminate their 32 bit apps long before now too...
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OpenGL’s number has been up for a long time, it was a mess with ugly code and nasty support and lagging features. If it were good DX would never have taken off and they wouldn’t have needed to scrap it for Vulkan. WebGL is good but it was also built from scratch with no concern for long term backwards compatibility.
 
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Lakados said:
It has a lot more to do with how people do their jobs now and where the money is. Software is being forced to be more fluid, pair it up with many of the higher level languages C# and cleaner API’s like Metal or Vulkan with better practices enforced by the tools like VisualStudio and you can get a lot done a lot faster than a decade ago.
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Interesting... I think its good, even if there's several closed 'walled garden' type situation in the market ..as long as ports happen and developers move around no problems, its cool. I would prefer open source things, but it is what it is.
 
When Apple dictates doctrine, the loyal followers obey.
 
Orddie said:
it also “Just works”
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Yeah...for the majority of Facebook addicted soccer moms and Instagram tweeners. But sometimes it doesn't, just like every computing device. Once we moved away in the enterprise from so many thick client applications the macs were able to survive, although the same could be said for a chromebook as well. There many times when it didn't just work. Crashing a phone with an SMS text with a certain unicode character for instance. Not bashing apple because everything has issues, but this arrogant attitude that apple people exhibit is a bit much.
 
M76 said:
And how is that relevant? A one-off scam, vs a company that keeps making badly engineered failing products that are overpriced and people still come back to them for seconds.
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My point is that the general public will buy anything, no matter what it actually is. Perceived or potential value sells, even if there actually is no value.
 
Orddie said:
you must really be hurt about your head phone jack being ripped out of your phone.

sooo apple found a way to force you to not hold on to your old app which will no longer work with your attempts to be current on operating system releases. I would THINK this goes hand in hand... and yet some orgs still run windows XP. Just because it works does not mean you should continue to use it. If it were not for some industry leaders (yes apple is one of them) forcing new ways of doing things (in this case - a software re-write) we may still be back in the black and white TV days.

change is good.
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actually change is not always good especially ill conceived change which is the change that we are seeing these days.

instead of focusing on stable well built software and products and allowing for solid principled work flows to be built on those foundations.
companies are just throwing things away and reinventing the wheel every product release. with new ui's, forced obsolescence,
less utility, added complexity, and ever increasing controls placed on what you do with your data .


so no change is not always good especially this new wave of change which seeks to further remove the power one wields over their computer and places ever more control of it into some corporate agenda.

todays reality is that change is bad . especially for the consumer and end users of digital products as the change being implemented is intended to harm their freedom in some form or another and to force them into a hostile market whose sole purpose is to milk them for every cent and byte that they are worth .
 
Lakados said:
OpenGL’s number has been up for a long time, it was a mess with ugly code and nasty support and lagging features. If it were good DX would never have taken off and they wouldn’t have needed to scrap it for Vulkan. WebGL is good but it was also built from scratch with no concern for long term backwards compatibility.
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There was never anything wrong with OpenGL with the exception that the consortium that oversaw development of the API were downright useless, resulting in OpenGL lagging behind in features upon the release of Vista where DX was in a weakened state with DX10 and a lack of backwards compatibility with older operating systems.

It seems the powers that be have seen the error of their ways and OpenGL has improved in leaps and bounds since the dark ages, we also have Vulkan and DX12 is once again in a weakened state due to a lack of backwards compatibility with older versions of Windows yet again.

Apple haven't cared about their desktop users/line for quite some time. Charging too much for mediocre hardware, prioritizing looks over functionality/thermals, poor design decisions and buggy OS releases that are becoming more and more locked down. I'd say this is just Apple's lead up to the implementation of their own ARM based architecture and the dropping of x86/64.
 
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