It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Community
General discussionApple really hate games - OpenGL/OpenCL deprecated in macOS 10.14(65 posts)(65 posts)
(65 posts)
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
This is my favourite topic
Posted June 06, 2018
As some of you might recall, it was John Carmack who convinced Steve Jobs that OpenGL was the way to go for Macintosh, rather than developing their own graphic APIs. Well, I guess now they're back to their usual shenanigans.
Posted June 06, 2018
avatar
mechmouse: It will be interesting to see if all these developers that put huge amount of time and effort into coding and supporting the 1 in 66 steam users that don't want to use Windows and use some of that time to support the 1 in 12 of us gamers that don't want to use Steam.
I would like to see data confirming these numbers. Is Gog entire user base even consists more then 1/12 of Steam's?
Posted June 06, 2018
avatar
Trilarion: ...Anyway, wasn't Vulkan supposed to be the successor of OpenGL as platform independent layer?...
avatar
Panaias: Actually, Vulkan is not a "successor" to OpenGL (in that it wasn't made to replace OpenGL). It's a completely new technology that gives developers even more complex & low-level graphics functionalities. I've programmed lots of OpenGL in the past few years (for fun) and when I decided to look at the Vulkan APIs I was amazed by the huge differences (I was actually scared :) ).
No, vulkan essentially replaces opengl. Opengl is the old way of doing graphics. Using Opengl to load shaders was a hybrid world. Vulkan is the modern paradigm where the shader is the first class citizen. You are pretty much meant to use vulkan instead of opengl at this point, if you are doing new development. It's way of working mirrors the changes that went into directx12, (and the way apple's metal does things) but they decided to start over instead of trying to bolt more cruft onto opengl. (In the same way apple decided to build metal rather than rely on others to settle on a standard)

The transition will be annoying, but a world of vulkan + metal is not that different from the old world of direct3d and opengl; and actually because of the design similarities, it is easier and less error-prone to create wrappers that can map between the technologies. Where the old opengl and direct3d technologies relied on a lot of hard coded behavior and were organized in a rigid way that made a lot of default choices for developers, the new technologies are all about a set of standard ways to interact with the graphics hardware that lets the developers make all of those decisions.

Opengl killed itself a long time ago, we just have been relying on it for cross-platform because it was implemented in enough places.

From an old games perspective, just because opengl is deprecated doesn't mean its going anywhere soon. You'll still be able to run stuff for a while, hopefully long enough for wrappers to be good enough. And it's not like opengl has been receiving major updates on OSX as it is.

The latest spec is opengl 4.6 from 2017. Apple is still on opengl 4.1 from 2010. Oh, and just for fun, before version 4.6, the last opengl update is from 2014. So there hasn't even been much activity with the spec itself (of course how could there be - vendors like apple weren't updating to the new versions, and opengl tries to have some backwards compatibility through the extension mechanism!)

Edit: although I guess we still have pesky DX12 to deal with. Bah.
Post edited June 06, 2018 by saluk
Posted June 06, 2018
avatar
Darvond: Well, I've always considered Apple a bit of a headless chicken without Jobs or Woz, and this only proves it.
avatar
Mr.Mumbles: Even when Jobs was around the powers that be never really cared much for gaming on Mac. The Mac gaming market persisted and even grew (however glacially) despite of Apple instead of anything the company ever did itself.
Apple basically conceded the general home computer market to the Windows PC; and focused on selling the Apple PC as an office/business computer.
Apple is totally focused on the tablet and smartphone markets. and PCs are now a minor branch of the business. Been this way for a long time.
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
mechmouse: It will be interesting to see if all these developers that put huge amount of time and effort into coding and supporting the 1 in 66 steam users that don't want to use Windows and use some of that time to support the 1 in 12 of us gamers that don't want to use Steam.
avatar
BlackThorny: I would like to see data confirming these numbers. Is Gog entire user base even consists more then 1/12 of Steam's?
Developers annouced selling 1 million copies of Original Sin 2, but steam spy showed 920,000

I've spoke to many developers, who can't give exact figures due to NDA's but confirm sales are in the 5-10% range with some reporting in the lower 10-20% range.

I think 8% which is about 1 in 12 is a fair figure, far better than the <1.5% for mac
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
Mr.Mumbles: Even when Jobs was around the powers that be never really cared much for gaming on Mac. The Mac gaming market persisted and even grew (however glacially) despite of Apple instead of anything the company ever did itself.
avatar
dudalb: Apple basically conceded the general home computer market to the Windows PC; and focused on selling the Apple PC as an office/business computer.
Apple is totally focused on the tablet and smartphone markets. and PCs are now a minor branch of the business. Been this way for a long time.
Which is going to bite them due to the CPU throttling issue, especially when people get sick of paying for new iPhones all the time.
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
kohlrak: especially when people get sick of paying for new iPhones all the time.
Heh, yea, I'm sure that'll happen any day now. People are getting smarter, and ... wait did I just see a flock of pigs fly over that valley?! o_O
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
USERNAME:kohlrak#Q&_^Q&Q#GROUP:4#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:36#Q&_^Q&Q#especially when people get sick of paying for new iPhones all the time.#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:36#Q&_^Q&Q#
avatar
Sometimes it doesn't require an increase in intelligence, so much as a decrease in funds. You have to remember the political angle to all of this, and things in general must ultimately get more expensive in comparison to the pay check to pay for the policies going into effect, whether that's hire income tax or higher sales tax. With every new "program" comes a hand looking for money.

What i'd like to know is why there isn't a standard for 2d graphics, yet, that is set in stone and we can rely on for all eternity. Think about it, when one of the biggest problems in regards to the practicality of OSes like Linux, BSD, etc. is tied to how slowly it renders a youtube-video, why can't we have a universal cross-platform 2d graphics library with hardware acceleration or at least provides an IRQ for vsync, that has an open standard that all graphics cards use?
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
kohlrak: Sometimes it doesn't require an increase in intelligence, so much as a decrease in funds. You have to remember the political angle to all of this, and things in general must ultimately get more expensive in comparison to the pay check to pay for the policies going into effect, whether that's hire income tax or higher sales tax. With every new "program" comes a hand looking for money.

What i'd like to know is why there isn't a standard for 2d graphics, yet, that is set in stone and we can rely on for all eternity. Think about it, when one of the biggest problems in regards to the practicality of OSes like Linux, BSD, etc. is tied to how slowly it renders a youtube-video, why can't we have a universal cross-platform 2d graphics library with hardware acceleration or at least provides an IRQ for vsync, that has an open standard that all graphics cards use?
I am not qualified to answer that question and probably never will be.
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
USERNAME:kohlrak#Q&_^Q&Q#GROUP:4#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:38#Q&_^Q&Q#Sometimes it doesn't require an increase in intelligence, so much as a decrease in funds. You have to remember the political angle to all of this, and things in general must ultimately get more expensive in comparison to the pay check to pay for the policies going into effect, whether that's hire income tax or higher sales tax. With every new "program" comes a hand looking for money.

What i'd like to know is why there isn't a standard for 2d graphics, yet, that is set in stone and we can rely on for all eternity. Think about it, when one of the biggest problems in regards to the practicality of OSes like Linux, BSD, etc. is tied to how slowly it renders a youtube-video, why can't we have a universal cross-platform 2d graphics library with hardware acceleration or at least provides an IRQ for vsync, that has an open standard that all graphics cards use?#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:38#Q&_^Q&Q#
avatar
No need for qualification, as that's a logical fallacy. It's a simple question, really: why aren't there "boot-level drivers" for commodity hardware and functionality? It's not like anyone's really been focused on developing new ways to draw a square on the screen.
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
kohlrak: What i'd like to know is why there isn't a standard for 2d graphics, yet, that is set in stone and we can rely on for all eternity. Think about it, when one of the biggest problems in regards to the practicality of OSes like Linux, BSD, etc. is tied to how slowly it renders a youtube-video, why can't we have a universal cross-platform 2d graphics library with hardware acceleration or at least provides an IRQ for vsync, that has an open standard that all graphics cards use?
No matter 2D or 3D, hardware acceleration will never cover everything that programmers want.
For example, hardware 3D acceleration rarely support voxel based engines.
Voxel lovers have to convert various algorithms or make their own tricks, to use a few functions that 3D hardware provides.

2D graphics have way more tricks to speed things up. It is impossible to support them all in a consumer grade cheap acceleration card.

For 2D graphics, software-based common layer is much more reasonable, like what SDL do.
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
avatar
kohlrak: No need for qualification, as that's a logical fallacy. It's a simple question, really: why aren't there "boot-level drivers" for commodity hardware and functionality? It's not like anyone's really been focused on developing new ways to draw a square on the screen.
I'm not qualified as in I don't know enough about the state of the field (or the difficulty of the task) to give any meaningful answer. You seem to know better if you know to ask the question. Perhaps it doesn't exist because nobody proposed and/or created it. If you know how ... you could attempt something like this and see if it takes off.
Post edited June 07, 2018 by Alaric.us
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
USERNAME:kohlrak#Q&_^Q&Q#GROUP:4#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:40#Q&_^Q&Q#No need for qualification, as that's a logical fallacy. It's a simple question, really: why aren't there "boot-level drivers" for commodity hardware and functionality? It's not like anyone's really been focused on developing new ways to draw a square on the screen.#Q&_^Q&Q#LINK:40#Q&_^Q&Q#
avatar
The problem is, it requires the hardware companies to play nice. VESA attempted this a long time ago, and even made a standard called VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE), but compliance was never enforced. As far as i can tell, what does and does not get attention and support depends entirely on the daily buzz words. In other words, there aren't enough people complaining about all that lost potential to get anything going. To implement it without the universal driver requirement, i would point to SDL, which is a software attempt at getting support. Oh, look at the topic titlle. SDL is totally relevant for 2d games, which there seems to be a big market for right now, and it's great for teaching new programmers (instead of teaching them via "forms" and "console windows" or the library of the day that won't exist when they finally code on their own).
Posted June 07, 2018
how is this gonna affect gog in general? will all the games just drop the macos installers? will cdpr finally give us Linux galaxy, since Linux will always be able to play the games that were ported to Linux, will the macos galaxy eventually whither and die?
Posted June 07, 2018
avatar
avatar
kohlrak: The problem is, it requires the hardware companies to play nice. VESA attempted this a long time ago, and even made a standard called VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE), but compliance was never enforced. As far as i can tell, what does and does not get attention and support depends entirely on the daily buzz words. In other words, there aren't enough people complaining about all that lost potential to get anything going. To implement it without the universal driver requirement, i would point to SDL, which is a software attempt at getting support. Oh, look at the topic titlle. SDL is totally relevant for 2d games, which there seems to be a big market for right now, and it's great for teaching new programmers (instead of teaching them via "forms" and "console windows" or the library of the day that won't exist when they finally code on their own).
Another question, slighty related: why hasn't MS enforced a proper standard for software installers? Why leave it in the hands of end users who don't know how to distinguish good from bad?
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionApple really hate games - OpenGL/OpenCL deprecated in macOS 10.14(65 posts)(65 posts)
(65 posts)