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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Now if only Apple stopped crippling OpenGL in an affort to push Metal, maybe we would get better games.

This is Microsoft's playbook from a couple of decades ago.

MoltenVK helps some of that, but I think it goes beyond supporting OpenGL. OSX just has so many things that cripple the gaming experience. Here at Atlassian we're pretty much a Mac only shop, and needless to say a lot of us play games as well. The amount of bugs we encounter with OSX compatibile games is stunning. The same game on the same laptop model on the same version of the OS will have two entirely different issues. We've gone so far as to dedicated the first hour of every LAN session we do to fixing OSX bugs. The consistent ones we experience though are input lag issues (i.e. to click and drag to select units, you have to click, wait half a second, then drag, otherwise the drag action will only select the last half of what you were trying to select), a lack of ability to minimize full screen apps meaning you have to close the game to change any setting or join a different discord channel (or do non-exclusive fullscreen, leading to a large drop in FPS), and a small subset of machines (about 1 in 10) that simply cannot go over 20FPS regardless of resolution/rendering settings/game selection. It's surprising given how good the mobile gaming experience is on iOS devices. It just isn't a priority on OSX whatsoever, and the UX of it shows.

Apple's terrible handling of OpenGL has been around before Metal was a thing, doubt we'll see a turnaround anytime soon.

OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal to Vulkan. It's very easy to transition from OpenGL to Metal, it feels like an improved API without global state and packing stuff into structs. Meanwhile Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you and you suddenly have to worry about memory barriers, image transitions, semaphores/synchronization, even in the simplest of applications.

> OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically.

The OpenGL 4.6 spec was released four months ago with new features and extensions come out all the time.

> Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you

Vulkan's API is unnecessarily ugly, it gives the impression of a low level API with all the structs and such but in reality the driver just picks up data from those structs to move around. In real low level APIs you use structs because they are memory mapped and/or aligned pretty much as the hardware expects it, but Vulkan is a hardware agnostic API.

And yeah, Metal is probably a better API but it is also only available on Mac which makes it a no-go for pretty much everyone outside the Apple bubble.

Personally i'll stick with OpenGL for the time being. I do not need much of the fancy stuff newer OpenGL versions have anyway (i don't do AAA-game level rendering) and i do not see OpenGL being dropped any time soon from any sane platform.

When it comes to Apple's stuff i'll decide between writing a small OpenGL wrapper myself for the functionality it use or just dropping the platform altogether when the time comes and they drop support for the API. Considering they still support Carbon (even if only for 32 bit programs), it might be a while until they drop OpenGL though.

Not supporting OpenGL on Windows, XBox, PlayStation (all models), Nintendo (all models) doesn't seem to affect game's quality.

It's such a weird narrative. OpenGL is outdated anymore; the Khronos Group sponsored alternative to things like Metal is Vulkan, which wasn't even announced until after Metal was already shipping, much less finalized.

Mantle came first, and nobody was ever going to adopt Mantle because it was an AMD product and nobody wanted to adopt a single GPU vendor's API wholesale like that. The two biggest platform vendors, Microsoft and Apple, managed to get Mantle-inspired APIs out years before Khronos got Vulkan out the door. What were Microsoft and Apple supposed to do? Wait? Force everyone to switch over as their APIs were gaining adoption?

So let me rephrase it.

Not supporting Vulkan on Windows (Only legacy ICD allows for it, outside Windows 10 sandbox), XBox, PlayStation (all models), Nintendo (all models other than Switch which has 2nd API, 1st being NVN) doesn't seem to affect game's quality.

Mantle is inspired on what game consoles have been doing for years, so it isn't like Apple and Microsoft needed to wait for it anyway.

Lack of tooling has been a common issue with Khronos and OpenGL ARB before them.

Pretty good at releasing paper standards, not so much creating SDKs with all the required infrastruture that other APIs offer out of the box.

To be clear, I think you and I are mostly in agreement. The OpenGL/Vulkan advocates are consistently pushing things that really only benefit people who have decided to adopt OpenGL/Vulkan without a lot of real-world support for their positions.

(Heck, I would go so far as to say that OpenGL as a vendor-agnostic API for consumer graphics cards might not have been possible if Microsoft hadn't forced some level of standardization across graphics card vendors in order to get Windows logo certifiation, and if Microsoft hadn't pushed Direct3D, we could all be stuck using Glide for some cards, a different API for other cards.)

Yeah, I guess we are. :)

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