Apple Announces A New 3D API, OpenGL Competitor: Metal

[mdias]

Taking this to the obvious next conclusion... wouldn't this compel Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA to come up with their own "API" to make sure that their hardware is being utilized to the "maximum"? And start paying devs to use it?

Sure, let's go back to MS-DOS era where game developers had to ship THEIR drivers for the "most used hardware"

[blackout23]

Maybe it would have been enough for Crapple to just keep their OpenGL support up-to-date. With OpenGL 4.3/4.4 there would be no need for Metal. Soon even Mesa will overtake OS X in OpenGL compliance. Only with 10.9 they started to support OpenGL 4.1 (from 2010), before that they were stuck with OpenGL 3.2 on OS X 10.8.5

[liam]

No they invent their own wannabe C++-killer programing language. Join the queue, Apple. There are a lot of killers in front of you.

Err, rust? D?

[rudl]

i see a new opengl coming soon :P

In times when you think things get stable and everything just works....

Lets just break things
make new apis n stuff
piss off your users

i see a new opengl coming soon :P

lets hurry to pulse/gnome3/unity/mir/wayland/systemd/btrfs/newopenglstuff
It will be fun ^^ I promise it will break all games and programs you loved.

Still got troubles with pulse from time to time. XD

[MartinN]

No they invent their own wannabe C++-killer programing language. Join the queue, Apple. There are a lot of killers in front of you.

personally, I'm partial to Rust ...

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Metal is for iOS A7 SoC

This Metal is to leverage the A7/A8 future SoC hardware in the embedded space, solely to eek out as much efficiency and performance possible, within the capabilities of their GPGPU solution(s).

OS X is a completely different beast. OpenGL is the defacto for it, period.

[MartinN]

A bit off topic but does anybody see striking resemblance to some Linux DE designs in the new OS X? The flat dock idea, the new window bars like GNOME Shell, the black transparent top bar, the Dash-like search feature. wtf

Apple's dying, they just don't know it yet. Linux is forever (mostly cause no one "owns" it)!

[omglotsofdots]

Maybe it would have been enough for Crapple to just keep their OpenGL support up-to-date. With OpenGL 4.3/4.4 there would be no need for Metal. Soon even Mesa will overtake OS X in OpenGL compliance. Only with 10.9 they started to support OpenGL 4.1 (from 2010), before that they were stuck with OpenGL 3.2 on OS X 10.8.5

APIs that have devs the direct access to hardware is always needed if you want the full potential of your harware to come out. Mante proved that especially systems suffering from low processing power and and bandwidth(see : arm ) gains more(like up to %50 , maybe more) with that kind of aproach.

[johnc]

This Metal is to leverage the A7/A8 future SoC hardware in the embedded space, solely to eek out as much efficiency and performance possible, within the capabilities of their GPGPU solution(s).

OS X is a completely different beast. OpenGL is the defacto for it, period.

Well I feel relieved now that the Official Apple Spokesperson has chimed in.

[zanny]

Err, rust? D?

Pretty much Rust. As someone who is big on the C language syntax, the changes are jarring and piss me off, but I can usually understand why they are there.

Except :: scope operators. For fucks sake, there are like 30 glyph characters on the standard keyboard, and you should at least be prioritizing the most commonly used ones to get single character operands first. It was a double colon in C++ because it was a hack on syntax, like pretty much everything else in C++. That is why we have && universal references and [](){} lambdas where you need the () if you declare it mutable.