Monday, June 4th 2018
Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL from MacOS
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.
Source:
Apple
58 Comments on Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL from MacOS
But... I mean technically OpenGL hasn't shipped with windows in like, forever. It's not "deprecated" there it just doesn't exist. But every hardware manufacturer on Windows implements it anyways in their drivers.
I'm betting they could do the same in OS X, if Apple will let hardware makers implement a "deprecated" API in their driver packages. They probably won't sadly. Walled gardens suck.
Now Nobody can say why games are not being developed for Mac..
its not because the developer didn't want to...it because apple choose not to
Longstanding rumor I suppose, but if there's a universal OS or a cross between iOS & Mac anytime soon then this makes sense. What you're saying applies more to Windows & possibly Fuchsia.
Deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL is ridiculous, especially since it's used in so many professional applications. Applications have long lifecycles, and will not be rewritten in a new API whenever Apple releases a new OS. Adding abstraction layers on top of these APIs defeats the purpose of having a low-level API in the first place.
But the big elephant in the room is iOS. Apple have refused adding Vulkan support for quite some time, and when they deprecate OpenGL their market share will just continue to drop.
Anyone thinking OpenGL is "dead" is wrong, it will continue to live on for many years. Many are mistaken about the advantages of Vulkan and Direct3D 12 over OpenGL and Direct3D 11. First of all, OpenGL 4.6 already supports ~95% of the improvements in Vulkan, what's missing is features like more control over memory management. We have yet to see games really taking advantage of the new APIs because we have yet to see games which are designed to use them natively. Vulkan and Direct3D 12 gives the developer more control, control which previously were held by the driver, and can obviously be utilized to improve the performance. But giving the developers more low-level control also increases the risk of the developers doing a worse job than the driver experts at Nvidia and AMD. The gaming industry in general is unfortunately plagued by rushed development and some of the worst code out there, it's usually slapped together code which barely works, and is rarely maintained as the developer moves on to the next project. The new APIs requires more skill and more well-structured code to scale well. I'm worried that the long term consequences will be developers resorting to libraries to automatically manage the features or more games using these universal pre-made engines. What you're thinking of is the old legacy OpenGL support which has been present in Windows since the 90s. But Microsoft haven't done anything to prevent graphics drivers from extending that support, unlike Apple who dictates what the official support should be.
I've never seen any OpenGL problems caused by Windows, despite having run OpenGL code there since the early 2000s. I've seen plenty of driver issues though, but none of which I blame Microsoft for.