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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Requiring developers to use an API locked to a particular platform feels pretty hostile to me.

So like DirectX?

I sure hate it when Microsoft does it, but at least they have market share. Who wants to support Metal just to target the Mac? And last I checked I have the choice of OpenGL and Vulkan on Windows because these days MS doesn't control the hardware stack from top to bottom on their software platform.

>I sure hate it when Microsoft does it, but at least they have market share. Who wants to support Metal just to target the Mac?

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.

CAD on Mac is pretty much non-existent, as is any professional 3D market - the market share isn't there, the hardware support is terrible, so few major players bother with supporting Macs. All this stuff is either Windows (CAD) or Linux (3D simulation, visualization) these days.

And with this deprecation Mac is pretty much dead as a platform for professional 3D.

Creative Suite has run better on PC and at better price-performance ratio for almost a decade.

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 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.

Visualisation is largely done on Windows, mainly with 3dsmax. Has been for a while. Linux is used more in movie VFX.

Your view of visualization is a limited world: windows and Max?

OpenGL is still an option on Windows, it's not deprecated.

It’s not deprecated because it’s not even there to begin with — Windows 10 doesn’t ship OpenGL by default; GPU vendors provide their own implementations.

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

> 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).

OpenGL is not a driver though, it's a graphics API

At least on Windows, the OpenGL implementation is part of the graphics driver. Why? Because by default Windows only has between rudimentary (at least up to Vista, I think; I am not sure about Windows 7 and 8.1) and no (Windows 10) OpenGL support - this is what the GPU vendors provides as part of his graphics driver.

> At least on Windows, the OpenGL implementation is part of the graphics driver.

It's distributed with the Graphics Driver, but most of it exists in a user space library, not in the driver proper.

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

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).

That depends on who you ask. OpenGL is in the deprecated API section on MSDN[1]. Because of the ICD model, Microsoft can't prevent GPU vendors from adding OpenGL features, but they don't bother integrating it with modern Windows APIs. You can't create an OpenGL context on a DirectComposition surface or in a UWP app. It integrates poorly with the compositor. You can't get composition feedback, and most drivers will flicker or show artifacts when windows are resized. OpenGL apps don't get windowed-fullscreen optimizations and you can't control when they enter exclusive fullscreen mode. I don't think you can use windowed-stereoscopic or windowed-HDR either. All these issues push developers away from OpenGL and towards DirectX, which is what Microsoft wants.

[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff8...

Deprecated means very different things when coming from Microsoft and Apple.

Not on UWP or store apps.

Exactly like DirectX. Great API to use if you don't give a shit about portability. If you do, it's useless.

No not like DirectX because DirectX is optional.

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