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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

OpenGL 4.1 means it's still 2 years behind where it should be, but it's progress, I suppose. It would be nice if Windows supported OpenGL by default, too.

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Isn't it easy to say where things "should be" when you're not responsible for getting them there.

Actually, graphics drivers provide the OpenGL interface, just like they provide the rendering backend to DirectX. People are going to install graphics drivers anyway if they're going to do GPU stuff.

Are there graphics drivers to install? I've just assumed in stuck with whatever apple provides. does nvidia publish third party osx drivers?

> I've just assumed [graphics drivers are included] with whatever apple provides.

That’s correct. When you buy a Mac, you don’t need to download extra drivers. Only if you buy a Mac Pro and later install a different (or additional) PCI graphics card, you may need to download drivers.

This has changed a bit now.

The only PCIe expansion capability available on any mac (including the new mac pro) is thunderbolt. The new mac pro does not have any internal expansion.

You can however, use something like [this](http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html), as long as you realize that you only have access to PCIe x4 bandwidth.

I've also not seen any posts of anyone actually doing this yet.

Yep: http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-313.01.02f01-driver.html

Nominally these are to support higher end cards for things like CUDA and OpenCL. Interestingly, though, the official drivers contained in updates from Apple have evolved support for pretty much every nVidia card since 2010, and recently starting gaining support for the AMD 7xxx series. For example I run a hackintosh with a fully enabled GTX 470. In Snow Leopard days I had use the nVidia supplied drivers for their workstation cards, these days it Just Works.

It's still so much better than any other OS.

Maybe if you use the latest kernel, get the latest driver for the manufacture, recompile X, Mesa, and a bunch of other modules you can get OpenGL 4.2 on Linux (with a ton of bugs)

Yes, I'm sticking to Mac OS X

No, you can't get OpenGL 4.x on Linux. You can't even get GL 3.3 -- geometry shader support is in it infancy. A quick look at mesa3d-dev or phoronix will show you that.

You are incorrect. Nvidia had 4.3 running on linux the day 4.3 was announced. AMD followed a month or so later after the announcement.

I think you're missing the implicit "open source" in this statement. The OP mentioned "recompile Mesa" and getting buggy 4.x support. No open source driver supports 4.x yet. I'm aware that proprietary drivers are far ahead, see my other posts.

The "implicit" open source in that statement is more than a little important to state explicitly. You're correct (AFAIK) about open driver support, but many many people use Linux, support free software, but are willing to install the nvidia or amd drivers for the performance benefits they bring so they can get work done. Especially if you're willing to cave and just use a Mac, I think the comparison to nvidia's closed drivers is a fine one.

I don't mean this in a bad way, but if someone says "recompile Mesa", I take it for granted that the understood context is "open source drivers". I didn't mean to confuse anyone.

Does OSX have open source drivers? How is this an apples to apples comparision?

Or just use Arch, you won't have to compile anything and still get the latest and greatest.

When did you last use opengl on linux? Do you use opengl on OSX?

Would you like to elaborate on your position, or just continue smugly toeing the party line?

For example, OSX has really bad (read: no) support for hardware slightly deviating outside of its niche. It also uses an arguably-broken UI metaphor, and has no truly good package management story.

What do any of your complaints have to do with the state of OpenGL support? It seems you're just using this as a soapbox to post anti-Apple rhetoric.

It was not a smug comment of any sort. What's a party line and how does one "toe" it?

While it is well known that Linux supports the most hardware devices out there (in absolute terms) and Windows is most likely to support currently common hardware, neither allows one to rely on a recent version of OpenGL being available.

On Windows one must install drivers to get OpenGL support because GPU manufacturers focus on the very platform-specific Direct3D at the expense of everything else, on Linux support is spotty and only through binary blobs because the same GPU manufacturers don't provide full open source drivers for the hardware their customers paid for.

I was lamenting the state of standards compliance in general and OpenGL in particular; in this particular case OS X does pretty well.

"neither allows one to rely on a recent version of OpenGL..?" Erp, where are you from?

Suppose I had GL 4.3 capable hardware.

Closed Source Drivers on Windows = OpenGL 4.3

Closed Source Drivers on Linux = OpenGL 4.3

Open Source Drivers on Linux = OpenGL 3.1 [best case]

Closed Source Drivers on MacOS = OpenGL 3.2

My Game Engine Requires = OpenGL 3.3

---

As you can imagine, that means:

If you're running Linux on open source -> no

If you're running Mac at all -> no

In fact, what is ironic is the ONLY systems in the ENTIRE PLANET that can run this game are ones using proprietary drivers, specifically Windows and *NIX (but not MacOS)

Yeah, that's not correct. Windows keeps fairly up-to-date OGL drivers through vendors (as makes complete sense), and the Linux driver story isn't terrible.

Windows also generally will try and install driver updates as soon as they become available--this hardly makes OGL some magical burden to keep up-to-date.

If anything, OSX has been lagging behind hard until recently.

When did this trend start to refer to things as a "story"?

It's a marketing phrase actually -- it's a holistic approach to how a product is presented. It took me a long time to understand it in its entirety, but nearest equivalence here is "user experience", i.e. the drivers on Linux are quite mature, stable, and performant (with the implicit comparison usually to open source drivers or another platform such as Windows).

How is it? Linux has 4.3 support (with Nvidia drivers).

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