Apple Deprecates OpenGL & OpenCL

[Staffan]

Congratulations to everybody who bought games for the Mac then. All these will become worthless when they go through with removing OpenGL.

[Mario Junior]

OpenGL has a garbage performance on MacOS, so nothing of value was lost.

[GruenSein]

Oh come on... seriously? Let me clue you in on a little secret, as far as developers are concerned... Vulkan's primary target is... Windows, and there is plenty of interest in Vulkan. All the engines anyone cares about are right here in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#Game_engines . Also in terms of the compatibility that actually matters unlike Mac or Linux support... The Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan, and while it's not confirmed, there've been rumours floating around for some time that the Playstation 5 will support Vulkan.

Sure there aren't a lot of Vulkan games right now, but games don't grow on trees overnight and effort is going to be targeted at new games not old ones. It'll be another 2-3 years before the AAA's have had a full development cycle while Vulkan has existed, and only after that will we be able to decide: "Has Vulkan been a success?"

There is no competition between the obscure Apple Specific API known as Metal and the important for Windows gaming API known as Vulkan

No need for the condescending tone but hey.. This is what happens on Linux boards, I guess. I hope, your crystal ball was clean when making such predictions. While Metal is no competition for any API used on Windows since it will never be available there, DX and Vulkan are definitely competing there and the outcome of that will have consequences on how developers think about cross-platform support.
AFAIK all Windows Store apps are bound to DX. With MS now offering a version that only works with such apps, the future development in this regard is very uncertain. Also, the list of DX12 games is approximately as long (or rather short) as the List for Vulkan (refer to Wikipedia for a lack of a better ad-hoc source). Developers will choose the API that works best on their main target platform, which is Windows at the moment. Depending on MS's support and commitment, that might very well end up being DX, which offers the bonus of also working on XBox. Should that happen, Vulkan will "only" open the market for Linux and Android gaming, which both presumably aren't generating too much revenue when compared to their Apple counterparts. Metal will open the door to the iOS market (big already) and the desktop Mac market. So, like it or not, it is at the very least possible that we will end up with two proprietary APIs as the most used APIs in gaming.

That being said, of course I'd prefer it if everyone simply agreed on a cross-platform API (even though I don't really care about games, some scientific apps are cross-platform now and I'd like them to remain cross-platform. One popular, widespread and well-established example is ParaView).

Uh, if i'm not wrong all big "graphical suite"' vendors (apple born with these kind of app) like Adobe, Corel, Autodesk use OpenCl in their products with great results. So, now?

I don't think they really did put OpenCL to good use in their products. In fact, in many benchmarks I've seen for video editing software on macOS CUDA comes first, the CPU second and OpenCL a distant third.

[-MacNuke-]

I personally had to remind Ton to contact AMD about how to port Metal 2 API in Blender seeing as AMD has already ported their Renderer for Blender on MacOS using Metal 2 API.

Honestly? After the long struggle (i.e. long time API deprecation) to port Blender to OpenGL 3.3 Apple just comes by and says "Hey guys, we will remove OpenGL in the future"... the very last thing Blender should do is to support this behaviour. What comes next? Apple drops Metal like they dropping OpenCL and then everyone has to rewrite their application again?

If anything they should only use Vulkan and give macOS the MoltenVK port. Putting so much effort in a "one OS only" Metal port just because Apple wants to save some money by dropping APIs is just plain wrong. Apple is the multi billion dollar company here... not Blender.

[Luke_Wolf]

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.

Oh come on... seriously? Let me clue you in on a little secret, as far as developers are concerned... Vulkan's primary target is... Windows, and there is plenty of interest in Vulkan. All the engines anyone cares about are right here in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#Game_engines . Also in terms of the compatibility that actually matters unlike Mac or Linux support... The Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan, and while it's not confirmed, there've been rumours floating around for some time that the Playstation 5 will support Vulkan.

Sure there aren't a lot of Vulkan games right now, but games don't grow on trees overnight and effort is going to be targeted at new games not old ones. It'll be another 2-3 years before the AAA's have had a full development cycle while Vulkan has existed, and only after that will we be able to decide: "Has Vulkan been a success?"

There is no competition between the obscure Apple Specific API known as Metal and the important for Windows gaming API known as Vulkan

[grok]

Serious things like scientific research, engineering CAD/CAM/CAE etc which require heavy usage of OpenGL or OpenCL it's never not done on a Mac.
Macs are used only by hipsters who hunt pokemons with their stupid iPhones, not real aliens using powerful radiotelecopes

Actually the Macs have a niche in astronomy IIRC, I did read that. I guess Mac OS X replaced the Unix workstations of the 90s and late 80s. While high end CAD and engineering moved to Windows, scientific visualization software and such were at home on a graphical Unix, where you also find matlab, gnuplot, the command line, other math packages, plus you get both Latex and Office.

I think this would be exactly the kind of technical users, for which a command prompt that shows a $ or % is a familiar thing and who had a megapixel on their screen already when we had a 640x480 CRT, but whose job never included being a sysadmin.
What if Sun was bought by someone else than the bad guy hyenas from the Lion King? Perhaps Solaris on x86-64 would be another option for this line of work.

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I'm dumbfounded by this announcement, in particular the garbage can Macintosh was fucked up (no hard drives! only one SSD!) so as to have two GCN 1.0 GPUs, no single GPU option, such that the second one was only really usable to run OpenCL.

[Weasel]

Just a pet peeve (although it mostly peeves me when people are talking about AMD)...

Yes Apple has a market cap of almost $1 trillion, but market cap has nothing to do with the company's ability to spend money on <what you want>. It just indicates what the funds invested in the company over time (probably a MUCH smaller amount) are worth today to the investors.

Even revenues (~$250B/yr for Apple) don't mean much, since most of that money has to go right back out the door again for cost of goods sold, R&D and other expenses.

The only dollar value worth citing is net profit, although in Apple's case that is also pretty significant (~$45B/yr).

So not disagreeing with your post, just the numbers

Thanks, learned something new.

[GruenSein]

Yes, Mac is used for PowerPoint presentations.

And we have finally reached the point, at which I will leave this discussion. A plain "No, I've never been in touch with any such organizations" would've sufficed.

Edit: To end on a friendlier note: Yes, sometimes Macs are also used for PowerPoint in suchdepartments. One of their benefits is that you get most of the Linux stuff and many of the libraries and tools can easily be installed under macOS and you can still use widely used software like MS Office without any hassle, emulation or compatability issues.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Uh, if i'm not wrong all big "graphical suite"' vendors (apple born with these kind of app) like Adobe, Corel, Autodesk use OpenCl in their products with great results. So, now?

In case people can't read

https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-ProRender-for-Maya-v2.3-Release-Notes.aspx

Radeon ProRender for Maya v2.3 Highlights

• • Support for macOS High Sierra 10.13.3+ using Metal® 2. eGPU devices requires macOS® High Sierra 10.13.4.
  • PBR Shader and Denoiser added in the render settings.
  • An additional control for setting camera exposure to allow adding more motion blur is added.
  • Texture gamma settings are now handled correctly.
  • Physically based lighting controls greatly improve lighting setups.
    • Additional area light shapes include: Rectangle, Disk, Cylinder, and Spheres.
    • Light color can be set by temperature, color, texture, or all three.
    • Intensity can be set additionally with physical units.
  • Maya Remap HSV and Gamma Correct nodes are supported.
  • More AOV's have been added for compositing.

https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-ProRender-for-Blender-v1.6-Release-Notes.aspx

Radeon ProRender for Blender v1.6 Highlights

• • Support for macOS High Sierra 10.13.3+ using Metal® 2. eGPU devices requires macOS® High Sierra 10.13.4.
  • PBR and Uber shader get more intuitive subsurface scattering parameters, simply set a scattering color and length for how far internal reflection should go in a surface.
  • PBR Shader Updates:
    • PBR shader is updated to easily do glass, organic, metal, plastic or diffuse materials.
    • Emissive weight is added to mix emissivity with the surface.
    • Cycles "Principled Shader" is converted to PBR nodes when using material conversion.
  • Uber Shader Updates:
    • Uber is now the default shader when adding a material.
  • Many new AOV's, useful for compositing or diagnostics are added to render passes.
    • These now appear automatically in Blender's compositor as well.
  • An additional control for setting camera exposure to allow adding more motion blur is added.
  • Image texture nodes now have a setting for "Texture Gamma". Set this to "sRGB" for color maps (such as PBR albedo textures). All other texture usually should stay as the default setting, "Linear". This will fix washed out looking color textures.
  • Physically based lighting controls greatly improve lighting setups.
    • Additional area light shapes include: Rectangle, Disk, Cylinder, and Spheres.
    • Light color can be set by temperature, color, texture, or all three.
    • Intensity can be set additionally with physical units.
  • Color Ramp Shaders are now available.
  • Max diffuse/reflection depth controls are added. This allows performance optimization for scenes that don't need much GI.
  • Adaptive Subdivision - in addition to setting a uniform subdivision level, this control allows setting subdivision level that "adapts" based on how large an object is to the camera. Closer objects will refine more, while far away object will not over-subdivide. This setting is in pixel units, so "1" will subdivide to approximately one pixel in size, set it to higher for coarser subdivision or lower for finer.
  • Blender smoke is rendered as a volume object.
  • Area lights can be made invisible to reflections.

I personally had to remind Ton to contact AMD about how to port Metal 2 API in Blender seeing as AMD has already ported their Renderer for Blender on MacOS using Metal 2 API.


AUTODESK Corporation is an early Test Corporation inside Apple. They've been working with Metal and Metal 2 API in pre-release for several years. They most certainly will have their applications using Metal on the timeline Apple has set with deprecation the first day it goes into effect. That is to say, the day macOS 10.14 is released their apps will be miraculously Metal 2 ready.