Apple has announced today in a post on it's Developer page, that OpenGL and OpenCL will be depreciated in the upcoming macOS 10.14, stating that games and graphics intensive apps that use OpenGL should adopt Apple's API Metal. Similarly apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks are supposed to adopt Metal, and Metal Performance Shaders. From the article:
Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques. For information about developing apps and games using Metal, see the developer documentation for Metal, Metal Performance Shaders, and MetalKit. For information about migrating OpenGL code to Metal, see Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View.
This seems like a very bad idea in my opinion. While I'm all for new APIs (Bring on more Vulcan titles!), forcing it on developers, and doing who knows what when it comes to the performance of legacy applications just seems wrong.
Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques. For information about developing apps and games using Metal, see the developer documentation for Metal, Metal Performance Shaders, and MetalKit. For information about migrating OpenGL code to Metal, see Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View.
This seems like a very bad idea in my opinion. While I'm all for new APIs (Bring on more Vulcan titles!), forcing it on developers, and doing who knows what when it comes to the performance of legacy applications just seems wrong.