Apple Deprecates OpenGL & OpenCL

[starshipeleven]

Cash yes! Customer care afterwards: No!

With a liberal sprinkle of designed-to-fail on top.

[Guest]

I tell you something.

I bought a MacBook Pro 13" (2010) back that time when it was updated. Thought getting a system that comes from one hand. The main intention was Java development. It ended up lasting exactly 2 months, then the HD died.

...

During the time using OSX (that time), the OS caused a lot of freezes during boot up and boot down. Random freezes there and here. And something that totally pissed me off was those hidden .DS_Store files.

It's unfortunate that this happened to you but it sounds like your total usage of macOS was just 2 months. I don't think that's enough to be able to judge the experience objectively.

For my main work machine I've been using a Mac since 2011 exclusively, and I've never had a hard drive die on me. The only hardware issue I had on 4 Macs in total was an unresponsive key, which was after I literally bathed the keyboard with Red Bull...

On the other hand the issues I have to fight with weekly on my Linux machine would be absolutely unacceptable in a work environment. That's why I only use Linux at home.

[Candy]

It's unfortunate that this happened to you but it sounds like your total usage of macOS was just 2 months. I don't think that's enough to be able to judge the experience objectively.

Sure it is. Specially if you come from a unixoid operating system with plenty of experience in that environment. You can judge by looking on the filesystem and organization of the files how much Apple fucked up the underlaying BSD eco-system. If you jailbreak an IPhone, you see the same fucked up re-organization of the eco-system. The existence of the .DS_Store files drove me insane. Everywhere, even in my private files and directories, those files pop up once you click yourself into these directories (or folders how you call them).

For my main work machine I've been using a Mac since 2011 exclusively, and I've never had a hard drive die on me. The only hardware issue I had on 4 Macs in total was an unresponsive key, which was after I literally bathed the keyboard with Red Bull...

I call this more like an exception these days - having a fully running Mac. Following the news - after Steve Jobs passed away - you read about Apple hardware related issues over and over in the news. Bending IPhones, Yellow itching displays, Lines on the display, Burning in the display, Broken GPUs on MacBooks, Broken DVD Players, Broken Harddisks (as in my case). And this for overpriced hardware ? Looking back the times where Apple still was PowerPC (using Altivec for performance etc.) are over. PowerPC was something that made Apple special and affordable. It was unique with an unique (superior) architecture.

On the other hand the issues I have to fight with weekly on my Linux machine would be absolutely unacceptable in a work environment.

Change the work environment!

I used to work as an IT-Consultant for a large cumputer company (used to be located in Falls Church) where every employee got a pre-configured (full of spying software) Windows XP machine (way back). I tell you something about "unacceptable" at work! You needed to contact your floor manager and GIS (these people pre-customizing your PC) before you can install anything on it. A lot of questions why you needed a custom JDK version on your machine and why 1.4.2 wasn't enought. And explaining them what Eclipse is meant to be and why NotePad+++ wasn't enought.

[lu_tze]

Wrong again... Carmac was just one of the many game developers who Apple consulted with in their effort to get more games on OSX and getting their OpenGL implementation up to scratch was what they overwhelmingly recommended and what made sense at the time as desktop was their #1 focus and the iPad was still some ideas on a whiteboard. Don't forget that Metal's "1.0" release was in 2014 while Vulkan didn't see it's 1.0 release until 2016.

Jobs never really cared about games; it was always more of the effort of the dev houses to bring anything than Mac OS (both Classic and X) making things easier for them. Also, Metal "1.0" and Vulkan "1.0" are not comparable; Metal 1.0 was a very limited release, that did only support a very limited use cases on very limited hardware (it didn't support the concept of GPUs with discrete memory, for example. That's why it was iOS only, where the GPUs are UMA). At the time, Mantle was behind NDA and it was already light years ahead of Metal. That's why Metal 2 followed in 2017 and still isn't on par with Vulkan 1.0 (and that's why MoltenVK has the limitations it has).

What the release of Metal 1.0 brought to Apple is, that they can claim being first and damage the ecosystem. People, who are unable to check what they really brought, will then repeat that claim.

These days they have Metal which started out as a genuinely necessary addition for iOS as OpenGL ES just wasn't providing the low overhead needed when you want to do high end graphics on mobile without draining the battery excessively fast. So when they got this working well there really wasn't all that much to justify continuing to duplicating efforts.

Or they could, you know, keep their OpenGL/OpenGL ES implementations up-to-date and bring in AZDO. Which is exactly the way that Nvidia wanted to go.

The fact that that Vulkan wasn't really even on the drawing board when Apple was already well underway with with Metal is enough to show that you really don't know what you're talking about. Metal was originally developed for iOS where the efficiency of low level APIs like it are most useful and it gave them a major edge that their competitors in said space are only really now catching up with.

That's a gross rewrite of history, Nvidia was already pushing AZDO and AMD was pushing Mantle, Vulkan is based on Mantle, together with Nvidias input. Why do you think that Apple has more knowledge about GPU inner working than Nvidia with AMD combined?

Other than that, I'm not really suprised, that Apple deprecates OpenGL. Their implementation is hopelessly outdated, and if they wanted to catch up, the OpenGL 4.6 brings in SPIR-V shaders (aka vulkan shaders) to the table as mandatory.

[GruenSein]

More like won't support Mac alltogether anymore.

We will see. Metal is already fairly widespread due to iOS apps, like it or not. Many major engines have supported it for a while. There is a big user base. Since many games predominantly use DirectX, the question for those devs will be whether to additionally support Vulkan or Metal. I am not sure if Vulkan will be more attractive to devs since the additional market it can address is the relatively small linux gaming market and possibly Android smartphones. Metal serves Mac users and iPhones. Things might be different, if windows devs were to choose Vulkan instead of DX in the first place. That, however, is far from certain and mostly speculation at this point. Also, there is still MoltenVK in that case. Since Apple has started introducing more capable GPU hardware and is actively promoting VR, consumer targeted graphics such as games probably won't simply vanish on the Mac.

That being said, as a (non-stupid) long time Mac user I would've liked to see Apple continuing or even extending support for cross-platform APIs since I value the current interoperability with linux macOS offers. The code, I am developing on my machine runs on HPCs just as well. The same goes for scientific tools like ParaView and such. Those will be the things to watch out for when OpenGL and OpenCL support dwindles.

[Guest]

I used to work as an IT-Consultant for a large cumputer company (used to be located in Falls Church) where every employee got a pre-configured (full of spying software) Windows XP machine (way back). I tell you something about "unacceptable" at work! You needed to contact your floor manager and GIS (these people pre-customizing your PC) before you can install anything on it. A lot of questions why you needed a custom JDK version on your machine and why 1.4.2 wasn't enought. And explaining them what Eclipse is meant to be and why NotePad+++ wasn't enought.

Shit, this sounds horrible.

My work environment is actually my own web agency so I don't get stuff like this dictated to me. The problem is I just couldn't afford to have my employees spend a day or two fixing the window manager or installing kernel patches every now and again. Also having access to Sketch is kind of a must in the web development industry these days.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not updating to one of the new touchbar Macbooks anytime soon. They really messed up with them. I'm just gonna see how long we can last with our 2014/15 maxed out MBPs.

[L_A_G]

Jobs never really cared about games; it was always more of the effort of the dev houses to bring anything than Mac OS (both Classic and X) making things easier for them.

The fact that he brought in people like Carmac and let them berate Apple for how lousy Mac OS was for games before doing what they suggested does kind of make it obvious Jobs & Co really wanted more games on OSX. Sure, it all eventually went wrong when Microsoft bought Bungie, the spearhead of their "Games on Mac" initiative and turned Halo into the killer app for their (then) new console, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter.

Also, Metal "1.0" and Vulkan "1.0" are not comparable; Metal 1.0 was a very limited release, that did only support a very limited use cases on very limited hardware (it didn't support the concept of GPUs with discrete memory, for example. That's why it was iOS only, where the GPUs are UMA).

If you actually read my post (which you don't seem to have done) I very specifically brought up that it was originally introduced on iOS as that's the place where low level APIs like it as most useful and incidentally it's also where Apple makes most of it's money. When Metal 1.0 was being worked on in-house at Apple in 2013 Vulkan really wasn't even in it's early stages if you don't count Mantle, which at that point had even been abandoned by AMD as they were focusing on working with Microsoft on DX12. The Khronos group didn't really get going on Vulkan until well into 2014 and were able to deliver "1.0" so quick only because of how heavily it was based on Mantle.

You can go on about features all you like, but when your alternative is literally nothing (Mantle was after all Windows-only abandonware at that point), then an API primarily made for mobile devices with unified memory architectures is going to be far superior despite it's shortcomings.

Or they could, you know, keep their OpenGL/OpenGL ES implementations up-to-date and bring in AZDO. Which is exactly the way that Nvidia wanted to go.

... and as I've said already, duplicate a hellova of effort in doing so. You as an idealist may not care about something like this, but when you're an organization with limited resources duplication of effort is a very real issue and waste of limited engineer resources.

That's a gross rewrite of history, Nvidia was already pushing AZDO and AMD was pushing Mantle, Vulkan is based on Mantle, together with Nvidias input. Why do you think that Apple has more knowledge about GPU inner working than Nvidia with AMD combined?

AZO is really not the same as a proper low-level API, it's just a stopgap measure and when Apple was working on the spec and initial implementation of Metal even AMD had abandoned their Windows-only API. It wasn't until the Khronos group really woke up around the time Metal 1.0 was released to the public that the development of the Vulkan spec really got going.

The simple reality here is that the Khronos group dragged it's heels so Apple went off on their own which years down the road lead to Apple being in the unenviable position of having to chose between pissing off the open source&API crowd, developers on their own ecosystem or hamper development and maintenance of their graphics subsystem by having to duplicate loads of effort.

[Happy Heyoka]

Apple's OpenGL movement was purely a John Carmack effect , nothing more.
So in a that kind of situation Carmack told " OpenGL is the way if you want me to release the game on Mac , including giving a speech about it on your conference "

Jobs was very much like that... his new best friend of the minute was right and everyone else was an idiot.

And of course the perfectly beautiful high level scene graph API (not comparable to OpenGL) called QuickDraw3D was killed in the process.
There was a less nice lower level triangle pushing API I forget the name of which was more targeted at games - I personally didn't mind that going but I'm sure it pissed off some people (Bungie?)

I still miss QuickDraw3D - I never forgave Apple for that - and it was strike one for me ending development for Mac OS - they're just too happy to throw developers to the wolves when their people are distracted by the next shiny thing.

[Weasel]

Is time for some capable soul to write an OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan...

This is what I don't get.

How can an almost 1$ TRILLION company not invest a couple of fucking developers to make a wrapper to keep their "legacy technologies" alive at least for "legacy applications", and yet we have a couple of developers working for free doing it with DirectX? (I'm talking about VK9 and DXVK, not vkd3d)

Keep in mind they did say it will stop working in the future, meaning they've no plans for a wrapper, full stop. I cannot for the life of me justify this, not now, not ever, regardless of my deep hatred for this company's policies.

I know Apple is a pathetic company, but come on. Why the fuck is Apple so adamant on removing stuff? They act as if it's a huge burden to maintain a wrapper, as if they have a bunch of coders in a garage working on it and very limited resources, when they're in fact close to 1$ trillion market cap, surely you can hire one or two fucking guys to maintain it and it wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket for them?!??

And despite this there's always people who will find a reason to defend this sorry excuse of a company, no matter how hard it screws them over (not just in software, also in price gouging and so on).

[elldekaa]

MoltenGL might be the solution here, no?