12
votes
Apple will stop supporting OpenGL and OpenCL in MacOS Mojave
Link information
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- Title
- Game Devs Express New Fears Over Future of Mac Gaming as Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS Mojave
- Published
- Jun 5 2018
- Word count
- 632 words
Damn. Between the quite out of date hardware they're selling and the deprecation of the easiest cross platform API, Apple seems to really want Mojave to live up to its name. An empty desert for gamers :/
I really don't understand why Apple is neglecting the Macs so badly, they're doing well financially. They've discontinued or neglected nearly everything except for the iPhone, and usually you want to diversify your income, not kill it off...
to me it looks like they want to focus more on mobile gaming, i.e. ipads and iphones and keeping maybe one or two products as "creators device". I mean, mobile devices are now on a level that they can compete with a 2 year old macbook pro. mobile graphics is becoming a lot better these days. the macbook is growing increasingly unpopular amongst users because of its shortcomings of connectivity and the bad keyboard and the only real and supported buying suggestion by macrumors right now is the imac pro. so you can imagine where it's going from there: the macbook pro is going to lose its keyboard and eventually become the ipad pro. the imac and mac pro are going to be the only desktop macs which will be aimed at developers and desktop publishers. my take on this, but I am usually wrong.
You're a little (very) off on the x year old Macbook Pro part. According to geekbench, an international (version with the Exynos processor) Galaxy S9+, the fastest Android* phone on Geekbench's charts, gets the single core performance of an Early 2013 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro, and the multi core performance of a Late 2011 15-inch Macbook Pro. Mobile gaming has come a huge way (you can play Wii games with Dolphin now), but it still has further to go to catch up to the bigger boys.
*I chose Android because while iPhones are objectively faster, you can't really take full advantage of the performance on them. The App Store lacks any sort of emulator, and has few truly demanding games. On the other hand, I can play games from countless consoles on my XZ Premium, and if I was a version back even run WINE and use Windows programs compiled for ARM.
I'm not and will never be a mac user, but it always raises alarm bells when a company tries to shut down widely-used cross-service technologies in favor of their own proprietary nonsense.
Unless they can find a way to monetize it. OpenGL 'adapters' incoming?
Seriously, though, this is going to do real harm to what little gaming ecosystem mac OS has. Very few developers will want to spend the time porting to 'metal' when it already works on every other platform already.
Those APIs will still work but Apple won't support them anymore meaning if something breaks they won't fix it. They encourage Mac users to switch to Metal-their own graphics library. There is no official support for Vulkan API but there is an unofficial open source implementation or Vulkan on top of Metal-MoltenVK.
Wonder how long it'll take for it to "accidentally break" and then be unusable, forcing people to use their own software.