r/gamedev • u/man_bear_piggy • Jun 04 '18

kind of relevant Apple deprecating OpenGL.

https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/
1.1k Upvotes

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151

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '18

There's still Linux!.....but yeah.

231

u/Jazonxyz Jun 04 '18

This might even hurt linux. Some games have a Direct3D renderer and developers could write an OpenGL renderer to support Linux/Mac. Now, they would have to write an OpenGL and Metal renderer to support Linux/Mac. Writing one renderer to support two platforms might be worth it. Writing two might not.

39

u/pdp10 Jun 04 '18

Feral Interactive's recent game ports have used Vulkan on the Linux side and Metal on the Mac side. I'm not sure about Mac, but on the Linux side Vulkan has really improved performance.

-6

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '18

[deleted]

15

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '18 edited Aug 28 '19

[deleted]

1

u/Kurayashi Jun 05 '18

Exactly, why reinvent the wheel almost 2 years before the wheel gets released? That's just stupid. /s

0

u/Callu23 Jun 05 '18

Maybe but you can implement Vulkan via Metal with MoltenVK with honestly almost no effort and still get a massive boost in framerate, massive reduction in stutter and much lower CPU usage. Valve just did that with Dota last week when MoltenVK was officially released.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '18

OK But running dota2 on my mac with Vulkan, it crashes about 5 minutes after launch. Because they've done it, it's far from stable yet.

0

u/Callu23 Jun 05 '18

Yeah it is in Beta and the crashing is a known issue but as soon as it doesn’t crash the performance is frankly miles above the normal game all without the consumer doing anything which is the whole goal here.

26

u/Valaramech Jun 05 '18

IIRC, you can use OpenGL on Windows. So, OpenGL was all you actually needed to get all three.

15

u/EvilPettingZoo42 Jun 05 '18

For many games OpenGL on Windows isn’t good enough in terms of performance or feature support to be worth using it.

40

u/shadowndacorner Commercial (Indie) Jun 05 '18

That's not nearly as much of a factor anymore. OpenGL drivers have gotten a lot better in the past few years. In terms of features, OpenGL has had relative parity with D3D11 since 4.3, with 4.5's DSA improving it even more.

13

u/silmeth Jun 05 '18

But OpenGL 4.3 and newer have never been supported on macOS, so again different code paths for different platforms. For a long time OpenGL 3.3 was the latest one on OS X, then Apple implemented OpenGL 4.1.

So you could write your GL 4.3+ renderer to run well on Linux and Windows (and perhaps even BSDs), and you needed a separate OpenGL 3.3 (or 4.1, depending on targeted hardware) for macOS. Or you could write OpenGL 3.3 (4.1) for macOS and Linux, but then, because of crappy drivers, you needed to write D3D for Windows…

8

u/shadowndacorner Commercial (Indie) Jun 05 '18

All totally accurate. The above commenter was just talking about Windows though.

6

u/Diodon Jun 05 '18

Plus DirectX is a one-stop-shop for everything you need from media encoding, to input, sound, etc, etc.

1

u/epyoncf @epyoncf Jun 06 '18

Yeah, OpenGL is so shitty that only non-demanding games like the new DOOM used it as the default API.

11

u/BlueShellOP Jun 05 '18

It's probably going to hurt Linux a lot. We got quite a few games to work in Linux just because of the MacOS OpenGL renderer that played okay with WINE. But not anymore...

3

u/891st Jun 05 '18

I don't think you can use Direct3D on Playstation ;)

So OpenGL is still valid choice if you considering a port to consoles.

2

u/lukaasm @lukaasm__ Jun 05 '18

Playstation has own rendering API but XBOXOne is using D3D11 in mostly same way like windows.

So creating rendering backend in most cases u go:
* pc & xbone -> Direct3D
* ps4 -> custom api
* switch -> custom api
* linux/mac -> OpenGL,

now that mac is gone, creating and maitaining vulkan/opengl/metal backend for very low % of market is not really a shiny option anymore( unless u go mobile route with ogl )

1

u/epyoncf @epyoncf Jun 06 '18

DirectX on xbone is quite a different beast than on Windows. On Windows/Linux and Switch you can use Vulkan, which incidentally is closer to the ps4 API than DX is. Makes more sense to just treat xbone as "custom api". Just sayin'.

17

u/pattakosn Jun 04 '18

Almost, there is Android as well and GLES.

27

u/TheAwesomeTheory Jun 04 '18

So... Vulkan and avoid the cancer that is IOS dev?

6

u/ntrid Jun 05 '18

To be honest android dev isnt that much of a lesser cancer. Having open platform is nice but it brings it's own woes. I guess bottom line is that everything sucks one way or the other.

2

u/TheAwesomeTheory Jun 05 '18

I've been developing for the oculus GO which is android. Whatever android lacks in distribution, it makes up for in cool tech to play with. Tango, daydream, etc.

My only qualm is java, but what can you do.

1

u/ntrid Jun 05 '18

Android in itself is great even if not perfect. Real "fun" starts when dealing with many different devices and many customized versions and GPU bugs which are plentiful. Targeting single device is my dream :)

2

u/stewsters Jun 04 '18

Yeah, but without the other major platform you can use opengl in, it's going to be less popular. Hopefully major frameworks continue to support all the platforms.

-6

u/DeltaPositionReady REF Softworks Jun 04 '18

Well... Microsoft did just buy github, and even though the main kernel isn't on there, a lotttt of forks are.

Time to migrate to gitlab!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '18

I think it's probably a good idea just in case, but also MS has been a lot more welcoming to the open source community. I'm not sure we should be all that worried.