Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else. All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.
There are plenty great games. It help to source them from a gaming community you trust.
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
People take level 1 accounts into legendary arena which shows that skill dominates money.
How on earth the devs at Supercell tricked management into making a skill rather than money based game is genuinely a mystery to me.
Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
Having a fixed set of hardware to target is a dream.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.
(eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
To expand on your example, I maintain a legacy app that is stuck in 32-bit land because it relies on the QuickTime framework. QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years, and the transition to 64-bit has been in progress for over a decade, and yet my legacy app runs just fine even under the Mojave beta. There are multiple time bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted.
Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
It has entirely been removed from the latest (since 10.12 IIRC?) SDKs so now you have to keep older SDKs just to build your app.
"MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple's Metal graphics framework on iOS and macOS."
It's a subset mostly for mobile.
On iOS, dunno, you probably have a point there.
It doesn't have the features you need when you're creating more complex documents. Last time I've used it it didn't even allow you to have different sections which allow you switch between the rotation of pages.
It's a very weird move to me, even if the software in question will be kept compatible with Apple's Legacy OpenGL, these versions will be worse than their counterparts running on other platforms making use of new shiny OpenGL features.
It's like Apple is saying 'we don't care' to the 3d professional market, also doesn't Photoshop rely on OpenGL these days as well ?
Yes, though with Adobe's relationship with Apple they probably got all the handholding and resources to do the port to Metal.
They don't? Whats the matter? (mine works great, but I'm not a heavy user so curious if it depends on the model or I just didn't run into it so far)
let alone the inability to reconfigure things like n-trig pens to have hover right click/middle click functionality, it's been INCREDIBLY frustrating without any communication from microsoft.
Overall it's rough, there are days where it seems better than others - but I'll randomly lose sensitivity and multiple reboots appears to be the only pseudo-consistent means of getting it back.
That being said - It's still way more usable than Photoshop/Illustrator on my Mac.
I miss 15 years ago when I had CS2 + Intuos Pro 2 and everything just worked.
As if my deteriorating keys on this machine were not bad enough. This wasn't a good WWDC for me. My PC is working great despite being an obscure setup with mismatched GPUs, can't say I understand why the graphic designer workhorse machine MBP is unusable with Illustrator and that is working just fine..
I heard they have a WebAssembly/WebGL version now, betting that'll get wrapped up in a WebView and we can all pretend it's a native program still.
Speaking of WebGL, that's basically OpenGL ES 2.0, but I assume the implementation in WebKit is backed by Metal? What about other browsers like Firefox?
I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
But it's also more difficult for the lay programmer to use as well.
OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal
I can feel the performance gains already.
Vulcan was created to get that same portability, with an API that fits modern hardware.
OpenGL 4.6 isn't anything like OpenGL 1.0/2.0 even though you can still _run_ those old OpenGL 1.0/2.0 tutorials.
You can even do most of the cool stuff of Vulkan in OpenGL via AZDO techniques (example: https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-vulkan )
Also on Windows.
Apparently, if you want to distribute your software to wide audience, you can only rely on OpenGL 3.0, with minimal set of extensions. Here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/GL3Windows#building-and-running
All the target systems had latest Windows updates, and they all run Direct3D 11 software just fine (I mostly develop for D3D and I test on them). On some systems it works in 10.1 compatibility mode, MS calls that “feature levels”. Not a big deal in practice, the majority of D3D11 stuff still works OK.
In the old link you offer as example, Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions (hence the need to downgrade the client), and fortunately obsolete. Current Intel integrated graphics have improved. And VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
Technically that’s probably true. However, if you drop support of Intel GPUs, your GL4+ software will no longer run on a huge count of older Windows laptops people are still using. For many kinds of software this is a bad tradeoff. That’s exactly why all modern browsers implement WebGL on top of Direct3D, and overwhelming majority of multi-platform games and 3D apps use D3D when running on Windows.
> VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
It’s only terrible for OpenGL. The virtual GPU driver uses host GPU to render stuff, and it runs D3D11-based software just fine. I don’t use it for gaming but it’s nice to be able to use a VM to reproduce and fix bugs in my software caused by outdated OS, windows localizations, and other environmental factors.
Intel GPUs D3D drivers have historically been better than their OpenGL ones (which isn't saying much since their D3D drivers are also trash), but now we're talking driver quality of one player which has nothing to do with the API itself or opengl somehow being outdated on windows.
But ANGLE also targets desktop OpenGL (and vulkan), and as OpenGL 4.3 adoption increases I'd expect increasingly more browsers to use it for WebGL 2.0 since you don't need translation there at all. OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0.
You seem to be pretty confused on how OpenGL versions line up with the D3D ones, too. For reference OpenGL 3.1 is roughly equivalent to D3D 10.1. When you're complaining about only getting GL 3.1, you're also complaining about being stuck with D3D 10.1
See: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Tutorial:_OpenGL_3.1_The... for a tutorial.
My Pascal-based Nvidia GPU is showing OpenGL 4.6 on Windows 10. Nothing outdated here.
I think you’re wrong here. Two reasons.
1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
2. Please read Intel’s documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... Specifically, please expand “2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors” section. As you see in that table, Intel says HD Graphics 3000/2000 only support OpenGL 3.1, which is exactly what I’m getting from the GLEW library I’m using in that project.
Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
Behavior depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
You're hitting the legacy path, that's well-defined ( https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/ARB/WGL_A... ). You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
> Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either. It still supports all the modern good stuff. And, as we've established at this point, it's not Window's stopping you from leveraging the full extent of the hardware you have. By contrast macOS does stop you from using the hardware you got to the fullest, as it's stuck on 4.1
For the systems I have in this house it’s not required, i.e. I’m getting the same OpenGL version that’s advertised by the GPU vendors.
> You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
> ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either.
Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is. And 4.0 is outdated, too (Intel Ivy Bridge). Meanwhile, modern Direct3D works fine on these GPUs, 11.0 feature level 10.1, and native 11.0, respectively.
Go read the extension I linked, it explains the behavior you're seeing. Also go read the tutorial I linked, it's using GLEW and shows you how to create a context.
You have a bug if your intention is to get a post-3.0 OpenGL context. Whether or not you care is up to you. You may be perfectly happy being in the compatibility bucket. I don't know. But you're not in the explicit 3.1 or later path.
> Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is.
Sandy Bridge is a 7 year old CPU. Of course it's outdated...? And D3D 10.1 is from 2007, it's also hugely outdated. You're getting anything more modern out of the hardware with D3D than you are OpenGL here. I don't even know what the argument you're trying to make is at this point.
GL should always work for the simple case, but instead you need to rewrite to avoid bugs in its many layers. And once you have Vulkan/Metal, industry-specific wrappers are better than the impossible to debug procedural GL junk.
Granted, this may also be true for OpenGL.
You notice that Apple supported OpenGL while they were making most of their money from desktop and laptop sales; but once iOS became so profitable, they decided to go their own way and start pushing Metal.
Lock in, or at least getting people to do more iOS first development (helped by lower profits on app store sales on Android, Android fragmentation, etc), helps Apple out a lot. You get the first version of apps and games, or more polished versions of apps and games, on iOS this way.
And again, I don’t see the benefit for apple over supporting cross platform apis to encourage development. It seems like a net loss for everyone but some line in their budget on driver maintenance.
Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS.
OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released.
In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal.
And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS.
And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to.
What's going to wind up happening is more software like ANGLE (https://github.com/google/angle), MoltenVK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK), and gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx and https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability, see http://gfx-rs.github.io/2018/04/09/vulkan-portability.html for details) for providing one set of abstractions on top of several different backends.
windows, gnu/linux, android; and what other os?
In fact, they couldn't get their act together, keep with current versions, and as a result titles like Elite Dangerous were being shut down anyway. Reason: OpenGL stuck on an old version without support of compute shaders.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/424243-Importan...
On PC: Maybe by number of games, but not by the number of players.
(I count Fortnite as an outlier because it's technically not built on a third-party engine)
There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?
My answer was aimed at that part. But yeah, maybe we should define what "custom" is.
The OP's point was that the companies that make these engines can afford to invest in supporting an additional back-end API though. I think it's hard to argue that any of the companies that develop these engines would not be able to also add a Metal back-end. Many of them already work across a pretty wide range of back-ends anyway. Xbox One, PS4 and Switch all use completely different API's, for example. I think most of the work is not in adding an additional backend like Metal, but in tuning the back-end for some specific piece of hardware (NVidia vs. AMD vs. mobile GPU, etc).
Whether companies are actually willing to invest in a Metal back-end remains to be seen, but considering many of them license their engine for commerical use, I would be surprised if the major players will simply ignore Metal.
I tend to agree with Jonathan Blow's comments on Twitter, that the low-level graphics API should be just that: as low level as possible, small, focussed, and not actually intended (but still allowing!) to be used directly. Engines or higher-level API's can be built on top of that, with the option to dive down to the lowest level when needed (which will probably be a rare occasion).
DirectX will definitely not be this API because it is Windows specific. Likewise for Metal because it is Apple-specific. Blow appears to be of the opinion that Vulkan is also not moving in the right direction, because it is becoming too complex, and trying to be too many things for too many applications at the same time.
If true, in a sense, it's not that surprising Apple is doubling down on their own API. I think they should consider making the API open-source though, and develop something like MoltenVK (but the other way around) for Windows/Linux.
OP doesn't know the diminishing profits of the AAA gaming industry.
OP would never have to justify to producers and directors why <1% of gamers should take 30% or more of rendering architects time.
more people than ever do.
What's the "etc"? Are there any other engines in that set?
This may sound crazy, but remember there are billions of iOS devices out there in the world, and I don't think X boxes plus windows game machines count in the billions.
Its true Apple hasn't won the hard core gamer market, but they are no longer the niche player that had to cater to windows users.
There should do, albeit not for gaming but most of the office software is Windows with DirectX support. You won't be playing on, though.
Oh wait, you can't.
Also looking at Apple's sells every year since the 6 came out, I doubt very seriously that Apple has sold more 6 phones than 6S, 7, 8, and X phones.
Also if the 6 from 2015 is not a powerhouse, neither is Samsung S8 that was just introduced last year....
http://bgr.com/2017/05/23/iphone-6s-vs-galaxy-s8-speed-test-...
Being able to run anything slightly demanding is other thing, but you can't argue there's no support.
Also, the benchmark you linked is for application load, which is heavily influenced by storage speed and load method (android has to JIT compile sometimes) and has almost no impact from the graphics' performance other than the bus between CPU/memory and GPU
Embrace. Extend. Then extinguish.
Just Replace. Extinguish.
Go back in time six years ago. What were Apple’s choices?
(1) continue to live with the deficiencies of OpenGL. Remember that, over time, it had come to fail at one of its primary purposes which was to provide efficient access to GPU hardware. Further, sticking with OpenGL would be to accept the leadership of a group that had allowed its flagship standard to falter.
(2) They could marshal their resources and create the better API that the Khronos Group wouldn’t/couldn’t.
They really had no choice. Note that Vulkan wasn’t announced until after Metal was released.
The gripes in this are should really be leveled at the Khronos group, which fumbled their stewardship of OpenGL and, with it, the chance to lead open GPU APIs.
The entire point of Mantle was to be a proof of concept that could be reworked into cross platform API (which became Vulkan), there was plenty of work already being done by Khronos in 2014 (and Apple knew this). And they just went out and released Metal anyway.
I also blame Microsoft for the same thing, early parts of the DX12 docs were taken word for word out of the Mantle docs, that's how similar they are. But Microsoft at least had couple decades of having a competing API, but Apple went out to create a new one for some reason.
It started as an AMD/Frostbyte proprietary API.
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2015/05/12/o...
AMD was basically in the same position when they started Mantle (at about the same time, no less.).
They chose differently. Now we have Vulkan. No thanks to Apple.
What developers will do is go out of thier way to support iOS and supporting the Mac is just a side benefit. Just like almost every printer company supports the Mac as a byproduct of wanting to support iOS.
I'm not sure they should have spun around and dropped Metal for Vulkan once it became available, or slow down the pace of progress til the rest of the market caught up. Doesn't make sense.
Also Apple is perhaps the largest GPU manufacturer in the world, with 200-250M GPUs shipped in 2017. That is 4-5X of Nvidia! Also Apple is investing highly in AI from tools to devices to GPUs, being able to customize may have tremendous value.
It is highly possible that Apple sees owning their interface stack as a means to keep their software-hardware warchest a couple years ahead of the competition. Which in mobile has been paying off of the last 5 years, as they constantly have crushed all others by 2-3X.
I would very much prefer games to use Metal on macOS (Starcraft2 is much smoother on the same hardware)
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/
And good luck finding a Vulkan version beyond 1.0, with extensions that work properly across all mobile devices.
http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php#android_devices
You get a spectrum all the way from 1.0.0 up to 1.0.66, with Vulkan 1.1 promised for Android P devices only.
That of course depends on the definition of "gaming space".
The classical desktop gaming space, Apple was never a player in it. They simply don't care about it. Hence why they treated OpenGL on macOS the way they did.
But: Apple is arguably the biggest player in the mobile gaming space. That's what they care about. So instead of spending a large amount of money to attract a low number of AAA desktop titles to their OS they just tap into the vast (game-)developer base that they already have in iOS and make it easy for them to deploy and sell their games on macOS too [1].
The move to deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL in favor of Metal makes total sense in that regard.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/apple-is-bringing-the-best...
One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.
This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.
I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..
Microsoft could not care less about OpenGL on Windows. However, it works just fine.
You know why? As soon as you install your video card drivers, your OpenGL implementation is no longer from Microsoft. It comes from AMD, NVidia or Intel, with all needed optimizations for their hardware.
Apple insisted in not allowing this and doing the OpenGL implementation themselves (which was always crappy and outdated).
Had they allowed the GPU vendors the ability to provide their own implementation, this would have been a non issue.
The real question is why would a GPU vendor go through the expense of creating and supporting such an implementation when Apple doesn't even make a computer with slots that you can install their video cards into?
If producing an OpenGL implementation doesn't provide a competitive advantage for selling their products, why would they bother?
Because it is a fact that Apple develops their own drivers. Also, when did you last download a driver update from NVidia for your Mac?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-...
Article is about Vulkan, but briefly mention Apple's own outdated OpenGL stack.
http://renderingpipeline.com/2012/04/sad-state-of-opengl-on-...
From 2012. Which means it is still accurate, given how out of date drivers are.
There are more references, you can look it up.
> The real question is why would a GPU vendor go through the expense of creating and supporting such an implementation when Apple doesn't even make a computer with slots that you can install their video cards into?
They still have GPUs, which can be Intel, AMD or NVidia depending on year and model. Just because they are soldered on, doesn't mean they don't need drivers.
EDIT: Some more research seems to indicate that there are drivers developed by NVidia for the NVidia Quadro GPU line.
It doesn't seem to change anything on the OpenGL stack, unfortunately.
Last week.
Nvidia releases drivers for cards that the drivers which ship with macos don't support. I would also guess that the nvidia drivers which ship with macos are written by nvidia under some agreement with apple, same is likely true of AMD and intel.
(Ironically, using OpenCL avoids this problem)
That's a tiny part of Apple's lineup though.
When Microsoft abandoned OpenGL for DirectX, GPU vendors produced their own OpenGL implementations because doing so provided a competitive advantage that allowed them to sell more product.
The question is, why would those GPU vendors do the same thing now that Apple is following the same path?
Apple doesn't even produce a computer with slots you can install their products into.
>EDIT: Some more research seems to indicate that there are drivers developed by NVidia for the NVidia Quadro GPU line.
Keep doing research, because NVidia provides downloadable Pascal drivers even though the last time Apple produced a computer with a PCI slot was the Cheese Grater Mac Pro which came out over a decade ago.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/27/nvidia-pascal-drivers-high-si...
Making sure nothing diminishes CUDA is very much in NVidia's competitive interest.
(Many toolkits, like Qt and Cocos2d, also use ANGLE on Windows for OpenGL functionality)
The same is true for plenty of other “Pro” apps on Windows.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore...
In case you missed the news, only DirectX is supported on UWP and store apps.
To the point that Microsoft has their own port of Angle.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/compare-...
https://github.com/Microsoft/angle
So unless they change their mind, say goodbye to ICD drivers on Windows as well.
I run Windows at home, but wouldn't if it went Store-only. For me, an open platform is the only thing Windows had going for it.
Quite a few apps like Adobe XD are store only.
Next Office for Windows 10 is only available via the store.
Microsoft has taken the other approach, if apps don't come to the store, the store comes to the apps.
So thanks to the outcome of Project Centennial, they are now merging the UWP and Win32 worlds into Windows containers and making the store Win32 aware as well.
https://bramwolfs.com/2018/03/13/msix-the-platform-for-all-w...
Deep down session from BUILD here, https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2018/BRK2432
Legacy software, blah, blah, blah. No legacy software runs forever, and least of all on Apple platforms. Who cares.
People in FOSS friendly circles really don't get the games development culture, IP management or the contracting business related to ports.
(Of course that does not mean that the OS needs built in OpenGL support. If you can convince an old game to use some kind of OpenGL-Metal compatibility wrapper without needing access to the game's source code or support from the original developer, that's fine with me as well.)
Requiring developers to use an API locked to a particular platform feels pretty hostile to me. Doesn't matter if that API isn't perfect, or even far from it.
So like DirectX?
Plenty of big 3D/CAD/etc players? In lots of creative areas, the Mac dominates still (despite stories about people moving to Windows nobody's going anywhere, where nobody = quite few creatives overall).
Besides, with Metal they'll target iOS as well, and that's a huge platform, and where most of the profits are for mobile.
And with this deprecation Mac is pretty much dead as a platform for professional 3D.
Graphic Designers still like Macs for the most part I guess -- and I still see them in video production a lot, but that's starting to change pretty quickly.
I think the Final Cut "Pro" X was the inflection point - the change is ongoing.
Which AFAIK they’re free to do on MacOS as well, they just don’t seem to bother since Apple was doing that work for them
As far as I am aware Apple develops the GPU drivers for OS X (though, I think, based on code that the GPU vendor provides).
It's distributed with the Graphics Driver, but most of it exists in a user space library, not in the driver proper.
I'm not sure. NVIDIA provides updates for CUDA and an extremely limited amount of updates for their graphics stack (AFAIK none at all for integrated graphics, for example).
[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff8...
* Being deprecated does not mean that things will suddenly stop working. It will take a few more releases of macOS before this can be removed.
* Next to MoltenVK there is MoltenGL, which is an implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 that runs on (edit) Metal [1]. That indicates it's at least feasible to wrap OpenGL applications in the future if necessary.
Furthermore, Apple wil drop support for all Macs that don't support Vulkan in this release of macOS [2]. Ouch, what a waste.
[1]: https://moltengl.com/moltengl/
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/04/macos-10-14-mojave-supported-... (anything from before 2012 does not support Vulkan)
You would be correct, but not on OSX.
The difference is that OpenGL is designed to be easy for humans. glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glVertex3f(x, y, z)...; glEnd(); you can't beat that. The issue is that it hard for the driver to optimize.
That's where Metal and Vulkan come into play. These are low level APIs, sacrificing user friendliness for a greater control over the hardware. It is designed for 3D engines, not for application developers.
Look into what it takes to write the minimum viable OpenGL program, written using non-deprecated routines, that puts a textured triangle on the screen. It sucks. On top of that, OpenGL is slow and gives you no way to create programs with smooth performance -- for example, it will randomly recompile shaders behind your back while you are trying to have a smooth frame rate.
1990s-style OpenGL was good for the time. In 2018, OpenGL is a pile of poop.
This happens in other APIs too (we definitely had it happen with DX11), it's just that OpenGL is a lot more complicated than anything else due to its history, so it has proportionally more bugs.
What? I've written commercial games with opengl on osx/ios and my experience doesn't show that at all.
https://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/1998...
State-based recompilation is a known issue in many GL drivers, particularly on mobile. E.g. changing blending settings may cause shaders to get recompiled. This can take up to a second.
Some engines work around this by doing a dummy draw to an offscreen surface with all pipeline configurations that they use at init time. This (usually) guarantees that all the shaders are pre-compiled.
To give a ballpark figure, my Vulkan "base code" is less than 2x what my OpenGL boilerplate is for the same functionality. The big difference: the Vulkan code is easy to understand, but the GL code is not.
Comparing "Hello World" doesn't make much sense, OpenGL gets really darn complicated once you get past the basics.
That's fine for a "hello triangle" program, but quickly becomes ridiculous for anything approaching a serious engine. There's a reason that glDrawArrays() has been around since 1995 (and part of the core specification since 1997).
http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/creating_an_opengl_window_(...
I wonder how much of this stuff is deprecated now.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/37575/
If game developers -- and game engine developers -- targeting OpenGL now are in the process of moving to target Vulkan, and if MoltenVK ends up offering better performance on macOS than Apple's legendarily anemic OpenGL stack, isn't this likely to be better in the long run despite the short-term pain?
It also doesn't come installed on my machine.
OpenGL also does not come installed on my machine.
If you care about performance it will just do something slow at uncontrollable points in the background, like copy CPU-GPU-CPU memory, synchronize against the GPU, do format conversions, etc.
If you're the one implementing GL, it's gotten gigantic again since they simplified it. GL 4.3/4.6 core has compute shaders, which means you have to implement OpenCL twice but different this time.
There's also the problem that a large chunk of OpenGL learning materials out there are hopelessly outdated, and IMO actively detrimental to learning modern graphics techniques. Judging from the types of questions I see around various forums, it seems to be VERY hard for newcomers to distinguish between "bad" and "good" OpenGL tutorials. In general, there's too much cruft for learners to focus in on the stuff that is actually part of "good OpenGL".
If this is the case, it's only because there is much more material and tutorials written. Not because OpenGL is simpler or better.
I know because I watch noobs stumble with OpenGL all the time over at ##opengl in freenode. It usually takes them a week or two to get a triangle on screen, and they're super confused about semi-opaque concepts such as "vertex array objects" (they're well documented in the OpenGL wiki, but reading documentation seems to be out of fashion).
It would certainly help (them) if they had a good knowledge about 3d graphics in general before stumbling into OpenGL. But if they had, they'd be able to do it using Vulkan or Metal with no great difficulty. OpenGL isn't at all better here.
OpenGL is not deprecated, releases slowed down since there isn't really much new stuff to add, but 4.6 was released just last year after Vulkan.
I also wonder what means for WebGL and its future. Right now, WebGL works in browsers on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, which is incredible. There is no equivalent.
Sure, Apple has started working on WebGPU, but that’s not yet ready nor is it guaranteed to gain Linux, Windows, Android support.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/tree/mas...
Apple has so little to gain over Vulkan by developing its own API but so much to lose by not adopting Vulkan (gaming companies may actually prefer developing games on the cross-platform Vulkan to target macOS/iOS devices, too, at the same time, instead of using DirectX).
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/pull/11#...
However, there's no real writeup of what the API will end up remotely looking like right now, so it's too early to speculate. WebGPU's original prototype used Metal's shading language for instance (since the prototype came from WebKit), but any real standard probably will probably change things up.
I believe the webgpu-servo folks have, in the mean time, begun working on lower level components/libraries to target Vulkan/DX12/Metal, for use by systems like WebGPU. Sort of like ANGLE by the Chrome team, but for newer GFX APIs.
TL;DR absolutely nothing is fleshed out at all yet and it seems plenty will probably change
Maybe Nadella will push for Vulkan support on Xbox, or maybe Xbox will die off, who knows. Unless one of those happens, DirectX is not going away. As soon as consoles come into the equation, you are stuck writing a PAL (or using an existing engine that already has one) because they use proprietary APIs and that's unlikely to change.
It's not ideal, but that's the reality. Apple is following the idiotic status quo, but it's not fair to single them out for it (that being said, at least Microsoft supports Vulkan and OGL on one of their platforms - but the 3rd-party driver developers are mostly responsible for the great support).
Same applies to Photoshop and other relevant 2D and video editing professional tooling.
Professional game studios always favored hardware specific APIs that allows them to extract all the juice up to the last drop.
For example, OpenGL ES 1.0 + Cg on the PS3 was an adoption failure, with everyone adopting the PS3 specific APIs.
>I don't see how a technology can get to a mature status if a major hardware company decides to not support it.
Alternate reading - They gave it their time and money, and it didn't work out.
If I wanted the best possible speed, latest features ect. I would write multiple back ends in things like CUDA.
I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.
:/
I'm not an OpenCL programmer by trade, but I have dabbled in it (Wrote an AES decrypter in OpenCL) and I have never found this proposition to be true.
That was the promise, but it never became reality. When writing kernels for real-world applications, OpenCL breaks down in numerous ways. The result is usually neither stable, nor portable, nor fast and a pain to work with. There was never OpenCL support for 3rd party developers on iOS.
You say you are writing OpenCL kernels on a MBP and they are portable, maybe you got lucky? Lots of comments I see on the deprecation on OpenCL seem to come from people who like the idea of having OpenCL (and its promises, which are awesome), but never had the awful experience of actually working with it.
I remember the open letter from the Blender developers on the sad state of OpenCL support on Mac (http://preta3d.com/os-x-users-unite/) from 2015. Some GPU vendors (AMD, Intel and Qualcomm) continued to put resources to better OpenCL support over the last couple years, but maybe too little, too late? It seems at least Apple had already given up on OpenCL by the time of this letter (and moved their resources completely to Metal), as nothing new has happened for OpenCL since then.
I'd prefer if we had a working OpenCL on many platforms. As we don't, especially not on Apple platforms, the step of deprecating it is regrettable, but at least honest.
It would be great to find out later that Apple had reached out to the Blender dev team with a strategy on how to move to either Metal or a Vulcan/Metal adaptor.
Personally I was thinking about getting an eGPU just for Blender use. It would be a shame to have to leave macOS just to run Blender.
Apple loved HTML5 when they had to kill Flash and get web developers to support mobile, but then as soon as it became a threat to the App Store, Safari's compliance came to a screeching halt and now Safari is in last place, even behind Microsoft's browsers, in HTML5 support.
OpenGL was useful when it was a way to potentially lure people away from Windows, but as soon as Apple had the clout to not care about it and force develops onto its proprietary API, that's what happened.
I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside. Makes you wonder what's going to happen if and when Apple no longer needs Clang/LLVM, or, hell, Unix.
Well, to be honest, Apple has always been quite consistent here. They created their own ecosystem and made interoperability with other systems as difficult as possible, at software and hardware level. So this announcement is quite in line with that.
And, I mean, c'mon. The move from NextStep to Darwin moved the kernel to open source. Webkit? Open source. CUPS? Still open source. Clang and LLVM and Swift? Open source, open source, open source. Apple maintains an open source page. They put stuff on GitHub.
I get some of the hostility toward Apple here; they're not always good at playing with others, there have been complaints about the way they do (or don't) contribute to projects they benefit from. But the narrative that Apple hates everything open under all circumstance and is all about proprietary everything all the time just isn't supported by reality.
So there will be little "forcing" into their proprietary APIs - the few 3D developers that actually tried to support Mac will kill the platform off because nobody is going to rewrite major piece of software to use Mac-only Metal. Too much effort for little to no benefit.
Basically Apple just killed off any 3D support they may have hoped for on Mac. Including any hopes on anything VR related (so much Oculus/Vive fans hoping for seeing a Mac support - it is now even less likely than Linux one ...).
There is a 3rdparty port of Vulkan and I am sure there will be 3rdparty OpenGL drivers (e.g. Mesa) but nobody is going build a CAD system on top of that, IMO. Without official vendor support it is just too risky.
RE: HTML5 - Apple simply made a mistake. Jobs famously said that they don't want to support native apps because bad apps could bring down cellphone towers.
MacOS gaming is not only not dead it’s flourishing rapidly. Take a trip to Steam shop. You will find a massive amount of games are made for MacOS and the numbers are growing rapidly since Apple lost interest into OpenGL. But then MacOS has reached a 10% of the desktop market making it much harder to ignore than in the past when it barely reached 3%. With iOS dominating mobile revenue , Appple is the undisputed king of gaming for over a decade now.
But, don't those engines use OpenGL on the backend? They need some sort of interface to the GPU, and AFAIK, OpenGL is it for both Mac OS and Linux.
Edit: Yes, at least Unity does. I can't find an authoritative source on Unreal.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-...
Edit2: Found Unreal info...they switched to Metal in 4.14. So, you're OK if you develop games for Mac with Unreal.
I guess it's plausible that Unity will do the same going forward.
A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK.
At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities.
So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level.
Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.
Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming.
Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.
If you're Pixelmator or Apple's own Final Cut team, sure, use Metal. For anyone else that wants to make a living, supporting multiple platforms is a given, so you won't pay the slightest attention to this deprecation notice.
On the other hand, they definitely made it harder for developers to create a new game engine.
However, where it will have major effect is availability of any professional software. Such as CAD. Mac has always been a pain in the ... platform to support because of their weird "Unix but not quite" ways of doing things and now there will be no justification to support it anymore, especially in the OSS sphere. E.g. I fully expect things like KiCAD (and also the commercial Eagle which has Mac support) PCB CAD to disappear from Mac as soon as OpenGL is removed. Nobody has resources to rewrite such software to use Apple-specific Metal. Another such project is OpenSceneGraph, a large building block for 3D visualization and simulation applications.
Actually, most game developers do that. Pretty much every game (even ones with a custom, "non-AAA" engine) will have some kind of abstraction layer for dealing with graphics API's. Writing an additional backend for Metal is not a monumental undertaking -- it's a tiny fraction of the overall code you will end up writing. Also game consoles, for the most part, use their own graphics API's which are not portable to desktop PC's.
I'm sure the Mac version of these tools aren't used by any studio with more than 5 people, but independent contractors, small studios, and individuals working at home really benefit (or else they wouldn't have bothered to port and maintain up until now).
I really like the idea of creating more space for the little guy. I want them to do well, but honestly I haven't had the best experience. As someone who uses the professional tools during the day, but has only the occasional needs for personal use I was happy to pay for a Mac-only tool. In practice, for a tool I only grab every few months I often find there was a regression in some feature that I guess is only used moderately often (selection boxes), it doesn't currently support that feature (I can't remember, but it was something like HSV color space, more than 8bpp, or some file format like TGA or PNG--not features you'd add to v1, but nothing too obscure), or there's another paid upgrade.
Even beloved Mac tools like Panic's Transmit, I feel like I can't 100% rely on. At a moment's notice I'll have to jump to something else to finish the task.
[1] https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17066846
As one of the creators of Direct X at Microsoft commented when Metal was first announced, "Why help Android siphon off their game developers by propping up OpenGL?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20140606055700/http://www.alexst...
Maybe the forced Metal usage (however shitty it is to remove support for an open standard) will increase macOS ports of games.
But in reality, 50% games will still be a wine bottle
Apple always removes stuff which looks untimely or just plain stupid (headphone jacks, optical drives, USB/Firewire ports, optical in & out, rosetta, APIs, etc).
Always the same outrage has happened, but things normalize then. People, companies adapt, hell does not freeze over, company doesn't go bankrupt.
I feel that maintaining OpenGL & OpenCL felt like a burden to Apple. We all know that Apple likes to control everything from hardware to user interface, and GPU drivers are one of the most notoriously complex, overprotected part of the software stack. In the OpenCL world compilers and other stuff (I don't remember the terms clearly, sorry) also gets in, and makes everything much more complex.
Maybe this move will help them to slim the drivers to the basic "hardware-software" interface level and build metal and related technologies to their own term on top of this relatively simple interface.
I have a feeling that metal can be directly translated bidirectionally and relatively cheaply to OpenGL (and maybe Vulkan and OpenCL too), so at the end things don't become extremely complex for everyone.
Apple doesn't feel that backwards compatibility is strictly necessary unless things can be translated and made to work with relatively good performance.
As a Linux and Mac user for 10+ years, these are my observations. They may be wrong, technically incomplete or else. Feel free to discuss, debunk, or downvote.
But that doesn't mean we took the best path. There is always an alternative future if x hadn't happened at all. If x hadn't happened, we might be in a better place, rather than accepting it and doing the best we can.
Of course. I didn't mean to say that Apple is designing the best possible future or making the best possible decisions. I'd rather have a future where these technologies are supported as first class citizens by everyone, and I can just cross compile this stuff with virtually no porting or optimization effort, however unfortunately this is not the world we live in right now.
As I said, mine is an observation rather than taking one side.
E.g. for WebGL purposes, all web browsers on Windows emulate OpenGL on top of Microsoft DirectX.
Nobody has USB-C stuff everything. Every owner is using a collection of dongles and it is absolutely stupid.
The OLED bar is also stupid.
I just hope my 2015 macbook never gets obsolete because I dislike the newer ones... and yes, I owned one, and I sold t after 2 weeks and got my 2015 back
They did, when they adopted OpenGL and OpenCL. Years ago.
Apparently they've decided that those have outlived their usefulness.
Yes, and this was so much against their DNA that it required the chutzpah of a Carmack to get the Apple's CEO to implement the decision.
Apple is and has always been a strict leech on open ecosystems.
They try to build closed proprietary stuff first to lock you to the platform, and when what they build is bested by OpenSource, embrace it and move on to the next opportunity.
They did the exact same thing with BSD: grab a beautiful piece of OpenSource tech, bolt on a metric ton of proprietary closed source tech on top of it, and call the whole thing open source to get love and applause from the OSS crowd.
Techies are essentially a gullible bunch.
Who’s going to start working on an OpenGL to Metal wrapper?
Way back in 2006, in CS175, we implemented almost all of the core 1.5 pipeline in C++. Software OpenGL implementations may not be the fastest, but they’re more or less trivial (quaternions, trapezoid-based triangle engine, painters algorithm, z-buffering, texture mapping, bump-mapping, lighting and various shading models), and therefore accelerate-able with CPU and GPGPU SIMD ops.
Also there is no harm in learning to write modular graphics engines with multiple backends, hobbits get to learn how professionals do it.
Finally, if it is just a hobby, then what hobbyists can do best to improve productivity is to use whatever their OS offers out of the box.
Would it be possible for this driver to add OpenGL/OpenCL and Vulkan support to macOS like it is done on Windows? (Or am I completely misunderstanding how this works)
If you have Apple desktop, a laptop, a phone, connected accounts, apps and associated data, maybe a watch or a TV you are fully within the Apple ecosystem. You cannot leave without it costing you major hassle and stress. This might cause surface inconvenience but it's not going to be enough to push anyone out from that ecosystem. Apple has their users where it wants them, and the users are happy.
The precise wording they use seems to indicate a view of dark themed sets as being less colorful. High contrast themes and visibility aiding limitations in theme color use have their places; so too do themes based around darker, more night time, friendly colors. Thinking of a system as having only one true theme, or of light/dark as being full / visually impaired themes is a dangerously limiting misconception.
Also currently Metal and Accelerate are completely unsuitable replacement to OpenCL for Deep Learning ... Not that deep learning on OpenCL was a thing yet but I was adding support to it in my own framework.
Parallel Ports
Floppy Drives
CD/DVD Drives
Older USB, Firewire ports
Network ports
They were the first to remove all this stuff, and everyone was shocked. Now they are doing this with an API. Both Apple and Microsoft have long ago created much more modern, highly performant graphics technologies over what OpenGL offers, and serious vendors support platform-specific APIs most of the time. If it takes Apple to do this and say to the world "wake up, OpenGL sucks," I view that as progress.
Despite, I don't think your OpenGL app will fail to run on Mac any time soon. I suspect it's years away before they actually remove it entirely.
But they do not.
- https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm
"CUDA/HC Portable with HIP", "Microsoft C++AMP", "Apple/Khronos OpenCL": https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP/blob/roc-1.8.x/d...
Should be okay for now.
Can't believe I'll actually have to switch to windows to develop my OpenGL/WebGL games.
Asking because I am not familiar with these libraries.
(as of high sierra python 2.7, bash 3.2, ....)
New thing: DARK THEME, YES, OMG :(
Is apple holding the future back???? Where is the innovation?
They should take a page from Microsoft and adopt an open, cross-platform technology like DirectX.
The First Moribundity was the period in the 1990s when Apple was coasting on the DTP and Photoshop advantage over Windows they had, reducing the features of their desktops and not innovating. Schindler, a smart but ineffective leader, was replaced by Gil Amelio, a star in his prior field but unable to get Apple headed in the right direction. It took Jobs' return to right the ship that time.
The emphasis on thin but less functional and less serviceable laptops, the dropping of OpenGL, the cruft piling on top of OS X to no new net benefit for users, and their coasting on the desktop market all point to this IMHO.
Apple is all about mobile phones, the Apple Watch and air pods right now. The MacBook is barely a blip on their product radar.
And honestly, their desktop line looks very similar to many PC companies. They make the Mac Mini (aka the Apple NUC), the all-in-one iMac, and the Mac Pro (ok, the Mac Pro sucks and there’s no excuse for it).
Anyone doing serious workstation tasks these days is likely using a cloud-based solution. There are a few specialized exceptions (ML development stands out to me), but none big enough to build a product around. Especially when doubling the entire PCs and Laptops category wouldn’t move the needle for Apple at all.
Visual Studio is actually an awesome development platform (I’m including VSTS in this). There’s not much secret sauce in Xcode to threaten Apple’s App Store revenue — it’s just a bunch of signing keys that Apple controls and manages.
I do think Apple will make a strategic decision to diversify from core Mac OS soon. The ever-shrinking space allocated to traditional computers at the Apple Store has convinced me of that. They have more floor space allocated to the Apple Watch than they do the Mac these days.
They tend to refresh in line with corporate cycles, i.e. 18 month to 3 years, from what I see.
PCs stand still, even laptops tend be mostly stationary. No wonder my work laptop is now 6 years old and I feel no urge to request upgrade.
Don't forget planned insecurity two years after release through unpatched software vulnerabilities.
https://tinyurl.com/yakmsz6b (sorry, in German)
But I expect cheaper devices to take more share, since the "high-end" won't give you much benefits over them. My 120 EUR Xiaomi already offers amazing cost performance compared to most other Androids.
My personal impression is that while pre-built PCs are mostly sold to businesses, there is a strong growing trend since a few years to build your own PC from parts. I really do observe that if mobility is not an issue, people now tend to move away from laptops towards self-built PCs (or often rather: let a good friend build one). I don't want to go into the details what advantages these have over laptops, but just mention customizability with respect to requirements (e.g. very silent, very high-power, ...) and repairability.
A small (but only small) contributing factor is that laptops do not have sufficient power for VR, so you really need a stationary PC for VR.
The strongest "dampening factors" with respect to this trend are the growing prices of GPUs, because lots of cryptocurrency miners (in the last years in particular Ethereum) hoard them (but it is my impression that this will somewhat ebb away as soon as attractive ASICs for Ethereum get released) and the growing prices of RAM lately. On the other hand the release of Ryzen made building of PCs with either very high-performance or very good cost-benefit ratio feasible.
A lot of early pcs were kits people built, and I remember pc gaming in the '90s and '00s was also heavily focused on custom built machines.
Cryptocurrency mining has kept the enthusiast hardware market afloat, I have a feeling...
That is why I wrote
"(or often rather: let a good friend build one)." :-)
Seriously: In my opinion (but others might disagree) an advantage of self-built PCs over one that some company produces is that you know exactly what components are inside (in particular you can buy components in which you trust), which makes you far less dependent on driver support by the manufacturer (i.e. you can find drivers in the internet by yourself if necessary). I often had bad experience with driver support by manufacturers (expect for a few well-respected names).
Also lots of cheap PC manufacturers install lots of crapware by default, while your self-built one is a very clean install.
In summary a self-built PC often "just works" far better than a pre-built one.
Just as an example, over at apple.com, the new iMac comes with 32GB of DDR4 2666MHz ECC RAM. To add 32GB (64GB total) they are charging 960€, or 2,880€ to add 96GB (128GB total).
Looking on amazon or geizhals.eu (price comparison site), 16GB ECC DDR4 2666MHz sticks cost 200-220€ x 2 = ~450€ für 32GB. That means you can save 500€ on just RAM alone.
Same applies to SSD storage. And graphics cards. And CPU. And basically anything you could want to upgrade.
Specifically Apple is well-known for their expensive pricing for better optional components (which is often necessary to pay, since for many models you cannot simply replace the component (RAM, SSD etc.) by another one on your own).
Couldn't this be simply explained by the hypothesis that people simply buy their PC parts mostly in the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop?
The kind of experts capable of understanding if they are ordering hardware that is supposed to work together instead of blowing up in some form when assembled, is quite tiny.
Anyone with a modern internet connection and a bit more patience than money (or at least a willingness to learn) can hop on Reddit or PC Part Picker and get a pretty good idea of what is out there and works together.
Compared to the days of making sure you had the right number and type of ISA, PCI, and AGP slots, assembling a PC from parts today is a breeze. Shopping online keeps costs low and places like Microcenter are great for buying in person.
I only haven't built one in a while because my current 5-year-old workhorse media/editing/gaming/everything PC shows no sign of needing a full upgrade any time soon. Sure I bought a new GPU after a few years when I got bitten by the experimental VR bug but other than that, it was an afternoon buying parts and snapping them together, an evening installing software, and 5+ years of "just working".
[0]: www.geizhals.eu
Examples:
1070: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1456548
1070 TI: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1717563
1080: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1449277
1080 TI: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1587606
come on steve, reinvent death please
You may call me Captain Obvious now. :)
There could be a number of factors that would hurt them, like margin compression, reaching market saturation, etc. All the ailments that Business Schools will warn you about...
However, they (IMHO) have become arrogant and out of touch with their users. VISION is their problem.
They need the MacBooks and desktop Macs to be seen as very desirable, in order to project the "creative people buy Apple" halo over the rest of their products.
Their B.S. is getting out of hand. List of gripes:
1. Heavy handed regulation of app store: This needs intervention from regulatory authorities. Apple has successfully inserted itself between the consumer and producer of apps. It plays kingmaker, and very clearly promotes internal apps to the competition (recent ban of the Steam app is a prime example). It's only legal recourse stems from being ~17% of the mobile hardware market, but from a paid-app developer's perspective, not being on the app-store is a definitive death-knell. It's a clear monopoly in the 'paid-app' space, and others are arguing a monopoly classification on other grounds [1][2]
2. Unreasonable restrictions placed on approved apps - like disallowing non-webkit based browser engines. Restricting API access though user security isn't compromised (dlopen, webgl-2, opencl, vulkan, etc). Restrictions designed to choke-hold potential competitors & restrict user choice
3. Forced licensing of hardware parts for accessory makers (look up the Apple MFI program)
4. Purposeful non-conformance towards industry standards (like OpenGl, Vulkan, WebGl, many, many holes in open-wen compliance). This non-conformance is steeped in monopolistic, unfair-trade-practices psychology to maintain absolute, unfair control over any potential competition.
I hope France fucks them for purposefully slowing down older iPhones/iPads. And hope the FTC, EU regulatory authorities pay heed to app-developers (and consumers) getting shafted by a beast of a corporation.
[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monopoly-ubs-steven-mil...
[2]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3157551/mobile/apple-must-fa...
Of course Apple doing it to force web developers to keep supporting Safari since no one can simply expect iOS users to install Chrome, but it's also benefit open web greatly since it's preserve status quo that we have more than just one browser engine. The day Apple stop doing it would be the day web developers going to abandon support for Firefox too.
Apple has crippled the mobile web since iOS reinvented the category. How many years before the file upload widget worked?
Unfortunately Google has abysmal power over web right now and I cant count how many times I see them cripple experience for Firefox. Now they even outright saying that new Adwords interface only work in Chrome. And AMP only prove how little we can trust Google.
Steam link is weird, but I thought I read somewhere that they would have had to pay Apple 30% of in-app sales.
But long story short is that I am paying them to curate the apps.
Valve tried to explicitly disable purchases through app, but Apple still refused it even if it's would only do streaming.
Stop developing for Apple products. Stop buying Apple products. Tell everyone you know not to buy Apple products. If enough people protest, they will eventually be forced to change.
If you think Android is really open, think again. Without Google Play Services and Play Store you are basically hosed.
Just don't give Apple any more money until they change.
You have to pick your battles in life. There are a huge number of companies I have chosen not to do business with and a long list that I'd boycott before Apple. I admire you if this is the cause you want to spend your life fighting for like I admire RMS but if that's the case one should really consider spending their energy ensuring a viable good alternative exists, and maybe lobby for regulations. Merely shouting 'boycott' in a niche community will not change Apple's behavior I don't think. This of course is not a discouragement to try, but a personal opinion on practically of achieving the desirable outcome. Especially so when the competition is much much more anticonsumer in a myriad of ways.
2. Again, you can use Chrome on a Mac. The App Store is not stopping anyone from using anything, it’s just facilitating certain cases. Microsoft installs its apps on your machine without asking you (and has an App Store). Don’t even get me started on Nintendo. Seriously, you’re complaining about the least worst (commercial) player in this space.
3. Clutching at straws here. No one cares.
4. You mean like OpenGL, and two other OpenGL things. Again, Microsoft DirectX is what?
5. Apple intentionally slows devices down to prevent random shutdowns from peak power draw when the battery has aged. This is a good thing, well implemented, but poorly explained. Apple has paid a PR penalty for its lack of transparency, and having them suffer regulatory punishment for this seems harsh.
Ok, I get it, you hate Apple. But unless you avoid all commercial vendors I don’t think you’re going to find someone that satisfies your peculiarly quixotic requirements.
2. What ?
3. MFi? The greatest invention ever. Now I am assured every single MFi Lightning cable is of quality and decent, instead of the crap USB-C has true into.
4. Industry standards of what? May be Playstation, Nintendo , or Xbox should all forced to be using OpenGL?
Yes apple should be fined for slowing down iPhone. Absolutely! But this. calling of B.S ... is just ... wow .....
And if you don't like or even hate Apple to bits, You can always buy an Android phone. Oneplus, Samsung, and the Vizo are all fairly good in Hardware spec. You have a choice.
Er...
So yes, Vulkan is kind of the universal graphics API now.
Nowadays Unreal Engine fill the role very well and can sit on top of any platform easily. Popularity wise , together with Unity have completely destroyed both Metal and OpenGL. Vulkan , stands no chance too. Unreal Engine is also open source and very easy to extend because of Blueprints. Unlike OpenGL , is not a C API trying to shoehorn itself into a C++ dominated world.
I have to use OpenGL 3.3 and I am amazed how badly designed it is. A brief look into Vulkan made even less sense.
I don’t agree with everything Apple does but killing Flash and OpenGL is two of my favorites. My only complain is that they have not done it as aggressively as they did with Flash. If they manage to kill JavaScript and HTML/CSS abominations I will become a hardcore Apple fan.
Unity and Unreal engines are both built on top of APIs such as OpenGL and Direct3D