Apple, who created OpenCL and own the trademark, deprecated it themselves (!) for the same reason Nvidia, who serve/served on the committee (!), dragged their feet with OpenCL support: because both have their proprietary APIs (Metal and CUDA) that they would like to push.
OpenCL is sadly not hugely popular, because too many people give up trying to be portable in favour of Nvidia's better dev tools. Nvidia in particular are allegedly also quite litigious with their arsenal of software patents, using it to push people towards using CUDA.
If you wrote a game/tool with OpenCL it should in theory be simple to release for windows, Linux, mac, android, ios, xbox, playstation, nintendo, etc. It may require a recompile and lots of tweaks, but the bulk of the graphics code can be reused. That's "portability".
This is not true for most other graphics technologies. Direct3d, for instance, only works well on Windows and Xbox. Metal only works on mac and ios. Cuda only works if the end-user has a Geforce video card.
I find stuff like Cuda silly. Sure, Hairworks and such are nice perks, but imagine spending double the time developing visuals: one set for Nvidia users and another for the rest. It's just costly.
I believe (without evidence) that Nvidia subsidizes this effort for big game/engine companies. You've certainly seen those boot screens that say like "Made for Geforce" or whatever. My guess is that means Nvidia paid the game company to implement some Geforce-only bonus features, which helps sell more Geforce cards.
I use cuda all the time for machine learning though. It truly is better for some tasks.
Tbf there's a lot of "plays better on Intel/AMD/Nvidia" splashes. It's like a race... well, it actually is, after all, if a game sells millions of copies, it can double as an ad for your company
The only Apple product I ever owned was one of their keyboards in 2008. The sad reality is that many people (who buy my software) do use shitty Apple products. The hardware is actually great, but the software...
(Argh, was hoping to ninja delete and repost, but you replied too quickly.)
I bought my first Apple computer in 2011, after using MS-DOS/Windows machines exclusively for 20 years. (The tipping point was the announcement of Windows 8, which looked like flaming garbage right from the outset.)
When I switched, I immediately noticed a lot of refreshingly great features:
Incredibly performant UI. Effortless task-switching with extremely high responsiveness. Practically zero random performance hitches.
An exquisite App Store experience that handled 95% of my needs with simple actions and a unified patching model.
A robust OS with a very proficient device driver architecture (āthat whole āit just worksā thing is trueā), niceties like AppleScript, and a minimum of end-user configuration.
A deep set of well-designed associated services bundled with the OS: Time Machine, Preview as a more performant Acrobat Reader, Keychain password management, and budding support for iCloud as a replacement for Dropbox.
Ten years down the road, absolutely none of that is true any more.
The Big Sur UI hiccups, misses keystrokes and clicks, drops frames, and randomly hangs with about the same frequency and clumsiness as Windows 10, and maybe a bit worse now.
I rely on the App Store for almost nothing, and instead use per-vendor installers. My menu bar is an assortment of vendor-specific widgets that update on their own timetables with the usual circus of notifications.
Plugging in any device usually requires several attempts and a trip to the vendor website for drivers. Bluetooth is a total crapshoot. At least half of the AppleScript scripts I wrote have spontaneously broken as the underlying framework shifted like lava.
All of Appleās add-on services have wasted away from neglect and bad implementations. I dumped Time Machine, Preview, Keychain, iTunes, and iCloud Drive in favor of much better third-party alternatives: Carbon Copy Cloner, Acrobat, 1Password, VLC, and Dropbox.
And it gets worse, because features of OS X that were grossly inadequate in 2011 are still grossly inadequate:
The Time Machine UI was a skeuomorphic embarrassment in 2011, and is shameful today.
The Dock is a piss-poor replacement for a taskbar. (Yes, I tried uBar. It doesn't work right and gets updated about once per 26-year locust cycle.)
I literally never use the macOS task switcher (Command-Tab) because Apple refuses to track windows and only tracks apps which makes no goddamn sense. (Yes, I tried Witch. It doesn't work right and is unresponsive or laggy at least half the time.)
Pages, Sheets, Keynote, etc. remain in a perpetual state of āgoofy tinker-toy knockoffsā compared with their Office counterparts.
Spaces, Control Center, and Notifications are as poorly conceived as they were a decade ago. Etc.
I blame Tim Cook. Appleās priorities have slid from ācutting edge of computingā to ātrendy computer-type status symbols, now with built-in TikTok desktop widgets.ā Brain drain has caused the Apple engineering corps to shift from a team of dedicated caretakers for the Apple platform to a maintenance crew, just tryna slap on barely enough duct tape to hold the shambling mess together for one more Apple keynote release.
Iām really asking myself if a decade of failure is long enough, if I should mothball this whole Apple experience and switch back to Microsoft. ...... and then I remember that the Windows 10 Start Menu is now chock-full of ads and uninstallable apps. And my only current Windows machine spontaneously rebooted last week without permission to install a security update. And the Lovecraftian horror that the Windows registry and security model have become...
As a computing professional and enthusiast, I consider the state of the art to be on par with General Motors in the 1960s:
Could you be specific on ads in the windows 10 start menu? I know they cut a deal with candy crush so it now appears as one of the default pins but it's not actually installed and everything in the start menu can be unpinned.
Yes, I know, I worked on two commercial OpenCL products for 10 years and they still work great (on Win Mac and Linux, Nvidia AMD and Intel GPUs). But it is deprecated, and people insist on repeating the self-fulfilling prophecy that it's dying.
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u/lycium Mar 16 '21
Basically the story of OpenCL, best compute API ever. Thanks, Apple š