Apple EOLs OpenGL and OpenCL in next macOS... WHAT THE EFF?!?

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LOL

What are they gunna add? MANTLE? AAAAHAHHAHAHAH

Hey if they at least use vulkun in the next OS and game devs are forced to move to vulkan in order to support macs then thats great for me at least.

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okayyyy…

As much as everyone likes to poke fun at apple for being stupid, and they are, but this is so dumb that we might actually be witnessing the suicide of apple.

I mean this could be fake news. My guess is that they simply won’t ship openGL out of the box and that you might have to install it yourself.

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They won’t natively support Vulkan. Only MoltenVK. They made it clear Metal is the only API in 10.14.

Says so right here in the Phoronix article on it:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Deprecates-OpenGL-OpenCL

Especially since MoltenVK is now managed by Khronos, which is about as official as it gets, I don’t see that much backlash on graphics.

Removing OpenCL though, that seems really stupid. I remember reading someone talking about how CUDA was so entrenched vs OpenCL because they had a head start, and no one in that space wanted to port something that already worked. Now that OpenCL has been around for a while, this just further fragments the market, and probably helps out Nvidia and CUDA more than it does Apple.

Unless of course, MoltenVK can somehow be used to port OpenCL?
If not, I wonder if Nvidia might release a MoltenCUDA to take advantage of this; doing so would encourage Mac developers to used CUDA, but in no way threaten their datacenter market (unless Apple has some plan to bring back Xserve).

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Who’s really screwed are Creative Cloud users, cause that’s the only way to render ProRes to broadcast standards… IN MACOS.

With OpenCL gone, Photoshop can’t use it. After Effects can’t use it. 3DS Max and Maya can’t use CL or GL and the recode scramble will mean nobody will patch their Macs and remain on old outdated OSXs just for everything to work… making those networks more vulnerable to hacks and leaks.

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Hey that means my 2009 mac pro is gonna be relevant for … forever? :rofl:

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As long as you don’t connect it to a WAN. Most production environments just keep old macs on a network with no WAN.

You have no clue how many people still run Final Cut Pro 7… A LOT.

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Everyone bitches at microsoft for not deprecating decades old busted shit
Everyone bitches at apple for deprecating decades old busted shit

what do you want?

This could be a positive - it will force either:

  • creation of an openGL shim like MoltenVK
    OR
  • people to actually update their software to run metal and get better performance

I’m hoping for option 2 but option 1 would be workable.

Just because the first version is old doesn’t mean the thing as it exists today is old. That is just not how that works. And neither openGL nor openCL is “busted shit”. Apple is just removing every single open standard from their ecosystem. That is all.

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OpenGL and especially OpenCL are actively developed, current technology. This is not about making people modernise their software, this is about forcing developers to use apple’s proprietary API. OpenGL is used by just about every current program. Removing it breaks things. A lot of things.

Please no. In a world where Vulkan exists, why should anyone, ever, use a platform specific API?

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I’d rather it was just Vulkan, but MoltenVK exists.

To be clear:
If they go to metal via moltenVK to make the application cross platform that will be workable.

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OpenGL is a single-threaded API in the age of 8+ core CPUs - and clock-speeds stagnated around 4 Ghz.

It might “work” but in terms of performance it is a long, long way behind - i.e., busted old shit.

Apple push things by deprecating stuff. This isn’t new. If you don’t like that, don’t buy apple. But if you don’t like that you’re probably already not an apple customer.

This is what they’ve done as long as they’ve been building macs.

Yeah it would be great if they went vulkan instead. But they didn’t. That horse has bolted. the shim between Vulkan and Metal isn’t that complex though and already exists. It’s not a major hurdle.

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While this is true the performance difference is not nearly as bit as you might expect. The only systems with noticeable improvements have mobile- or dual core processors. And in Vulkan most work is also done by a single processor as well.

But I think this all misses the real issue. Of games shouldn’t use OpenGL anymore, but there is soo many other applications that are affected by this. QT uses OpenGL. Gtk+ uses OpenGL. Firefox uses OpenGL. Skia, and by extension Chromium and all Apps based on electron use OpenGL. None of these will see any noticeable benefit from using Metal.

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Have you benchmarked that?

Either way, whether or not it is a performance benefit or not - there are situations where metal is a performance advantage. It also frees Apple to make whatever changes to the API in future as they see fit.

OpenGL on Apple was already massively out of date - the sooner people deploying 3d software to mac get off openGL and onto Metal or at least MoltenVK the better to be honest.

It was already not really maintained.

OpenCL - surprised at that one, but I guess apple would rather maintain one API instead of 3… (or 4, if they were to include vulkan support natively as well).

Everyone said something about OpenGL and CL already. Vulkan would be nice for multi platform because walled gardens are bad and so on.

However here is your typical “Apple knows best”-guy:
image
Except Apple has been using AMD graphics of the longest time?

Imagine if Molex was to change the miniFit connector (PCIe 6 or 8 pin) just a little bit. Would not fuck over half the market, would it?

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I haven’t, but others have.

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gl-vk-eoy2017&num=2

There’s even some cases where performance degraded because OpenGL drivers have enjoyed years of optimization. Vulkan lowers CPU overhead, but does little for the GPU. So the only systems that profit from it are the CPU bound ones.

But again, this is all besides the point. Yes, graphics heavy software should use Vulkan. The vast majority of software is not graphics heavy.


I wonder how blender is gonna deal with this. They are heavily invested into OpenGL and switching to Vulkan would break third party addons they have no control over (and thus cannot fix). And since blender addons are written in python and Vulkan is lower level than OpenGL work would be shifted from C to python, slowing things down.

All in all this is another move for mac away from being a useful tool for any professional purpose.
Said it before, “Pro” is the apple equivalent to “gaming” on any other piece of hardware.
It means nothing anymore. And this move only proves that.

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You forgot:

Everyone bitches at linux for developing new replacements and for not deprecating decades old busted shit

We get the best of both! Whoo hoo! Although systemd does suck


So this puts pressure on them to switch to Vulkan, and pressure on some graphics-intensive plugins to stop using Python. Double win in my book.


The important thing here is that MoltenVK is now managed by Khronos, it’s about as official as a compatibility layer gets. If you want to be cross-platform, Vulkan will soon be your only option, Apple devices will just get slightly impaired performance.

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Hooray for runit!!