Apple kills openGL no more warzone?

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Quenton
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Apple kills openGL no more warzone?

Post by Quenton »

post of friends

Apple, at WWDC 2018, announced that with the latest update to MacOS, its operating system for iMac desktops and MacBooks, the company is deprecating two of the industry's leading APIs, OpenGL and OpenCL, in a bid to boost adoption of its own Metal API. OpenGL and OpenCL applications will continue to function on MacOS 10.14, but the APIs themselves will be deprecated going forward. The removal of OpenGL from future MacOS releases breaks most AAA cross-platform games playable on the Mac, particularly distributed over Steam. The deprecation of OpenCL comes as a surprise to the scientific community, as several computational applications running on Mac Pros will be affected. Adobe Creativity Suite applications take advantage of both APIs. Apple is pushing for Metal's compute-shader features to replace the API.
cybersphinx
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Re: Apple kills openGL no more warzone?

Post by cybersphinx »

Apple kills openGL no more Apple?
We want information... information... information.
pastdue
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Re: Apple kills openGL no more warzone?

Post by pastdue »

A lot of folks are jumping to conclusions with this.

Apple announced that they are deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL - this means that they are discouraged for future use. They are encouraging developers of game engines to use Metal going forward.

They have not announced any date for when those technologies are removed from macOS.

A lot of APIs that were deprecated many, many, many years ago still exist in macOS (for compatibility / functionality reasons). I suspect (for similar reasons), it will be a while before OpenGL and OpenCL actually "disappear".

Might there be new Mac hardware released at some point that doesn't support OpenGL? Sure. Or maybe that hardware will support it in "software rendering" mode (as has existed in macOS for a while) for compatibility purposes.

In any event, none of this prevents Warzone from working at some undetermined future date. Why?
  • Supporting multiple graphics APIs is something game engines do, and is doable here. A native Metal renderer could be written.
    But...
  • There are already tools that can translate other graphics APIs (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan) to Metal. And these tools / layers are only getting better. They can be used here too.
So basically: I wouldn't worry about Warzone.
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