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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

No need when Unreal, Unity, Crytek and every other game engine that matters already support Metal.

That won't help those who don't have resources to add support for a redundant API, and would rather leave MacOS without some features than do the former.

Example: https://www.winehq.org//wwn/404

> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.

> wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts.

Well that says it all, even if Apple had an up to date OpenGL driver, that wouldn't help.

That phrase is confusing. They can use core profile, but Apple is simply stuck on older OpenGL, so features they rely on to implement DX11 aren't available on MacOS. So if Apple would have provided full OpenGL 4.5+ support, it wouldn't have been an issue.

I've not heard of any games or VR software released to the market that use Metal yet. I've heard it mentioned about projects still in development but so far that's all.

Do you have any examples of things using it?

Some games:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vainglory/id671464704?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sky-gamblers-storm-raiders/i...

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/radiation-island/id923760656...

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/asphalt-8-airborne/id6103919...

Adobe After Effects

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/after-effects-cc-2015-...

Adobe Premier Pro

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/up-next-for-premiere-p...

Apple's hardware can't even handle serious VR, so the usefulness of spending time on Metal for it is quite moot.

Sorry I should have been more specific, I meant macOS. Still it's cool that Adobe are using it.

Both Unity and Unreal Engine (UE4) supports Metal, so any games created in Unity/UE4 for Mac & iOS might possibly use it. If the game doesn't need anything beyond GL 3 support then the creator might choose to not enable Metal and stick with GL.

I don't know what percentage of Unity/UE4 Mac & iOS games have Metal enabled, but it is potentially a very large number.

That's the thing about Metal -- as long as common libraries and game engines add support for it, most developers won't have to do much additional work to use it. Only people who are writing their own graphics engine from scratch would need to learn it.

See example above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221395

Not everyone is going to spend resources on implementing a redundant API. Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks by not supporting OpenGL and Vulkan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com