Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area.
I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else. All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
Apple must truly hate gaming, or suffer from a serious case of Not Invented Here with their Metal stuff. As if any serious gaming studio would target Metal which doesn't run on Windows.
In fact, they couldn't get their act together, keep with current versions, and as a result titles like Elite Dangerous were being shut down anyway. Reason: OpenGL stuck on an old version without support of compute shaders.
To be fair, most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc, which all support Metal already. Hardly anyone writes their own game engines these days, and if they do they probably have the resources to support Metal.
Overall still a bummer though.
The problem is still with apple forcing them to invest resources, without any reason, but to advance their vendor lock in. And if you're a developper of a small high performance 3d graphics and gpu computing library like me, its just a giant middle finger from apple and I will either need to drop opengl/opencl or apple - there is no way that i can afford to offer both, especially since i'd need to buy apple hardware to test things.
The Witcher 3 is using RedEngine, GTA V RAGE, the Battlefields and SW:Battlefront {1,2} are using Frostbite IIRC, the two new Tomb Raider on Horizon, Rainbow 6 Siege and the Assassin's creed are on Anvil, Overwatch & SC2 have their own engines too, same for League of Legends, CoD are on a heavily customized id Engine, Minecraft is custom, Bethesda have their own engines too for Skyrim & Fallout, Path of Exile cutom too, all taken from Steam 100 most played.
That's a nice list, quite complete. Many console exclusives also use custom engines by the way, e.g. Decima for Horizon:ZD, KillZone and Death Stranding, Naughty Dog has their own engine (don't know the name), etc.
The OP's point was that the companies that make these engines can afford to invest in supporting an additional back-end API though. I think it's hard to argue that any of the companies that develop these engines would not be able to also add a Metal back-end. Many of them already work across a pretty wide range of back-ends anyway. Xbox One, PS4 and Switch all use completely different API's, for example. I think most of the work is not in adding an additional backend like Metal, but in tuning the back-end for some specific piece of hardware (NVidia vs. AMD vs. mobile GPU, etc).
Whether companies are actually willing to invest in a Metal back-end remains to be seen, but considering many of them license their engine for commerical use, I would be surprised if the major players will simply ignore Metal.
I tend to agree with Jonathan Blow's comments on Twitter, that the low-level graphics API should be just that: as low level as possible, small, focussed, and not actually intended (but still allowing!) to be used directly. Engines or higher-level API's can be built on top of that, with the option to dive down to the lowest level when needed (which will probably be a rare occasion).
DirectX will definitely not be this API because it is Windows specific. Likewise for Metal because it is Apple-specific. Blow appears to be of the opinion that Vulkan is also not moving in the right direction, because it is becoming too complex, and trying to be too many things for too many applications at the same time.
If true, in a sense, it's not that surprising Apple is doubling down on their own API. I think they should consider making the API open-source though, and develop something like MoltenVK (but the other way around) for Windows/Linux.
The top 10 most played today in steam are using UE4 (2), Source 2, Source (2), and custom engines (5: AnvilNext, RAGE, Evolution). That's a lot of variety, there's almost no reuse.
With a bit of luck, Godot Engine. Sort of a dark horse, but I like it and my very smart corporate-programmer brother likes it. He says it's designed like a programmer would design it: everything's a node. I know I did a game in Unity (which has become overcomplicated) and had a surprisingly easy time jumping into Godot.
Go back in time six years ago. What were Apple’s choices?
(1) continue to live with the deficiencies of OpenGL. Remember that, over time, it had come to fail at one of its primary purposes which was to provide efficient access to GPU hardware. Further, sticking with OpenGL would be to accept the leadership of a group that had allowed its flagship standard to falter.
(2) They could marshal their resources and create the better API that the Khronos Group wouldn’t/couldn’t.
They really had no choice. Note that Vulkan wasn’t announced until after Metal was released.
The gripes in this are should really be leveled at the Khronos group, which fumbled their stewardship of OpenGL and, with it, the chance to lead open GPU APIs.
The time table is being pretty generous to Apple. Metal, Vulkan, and DX12 are reworked versions of Mantle.
The entire point of Mantle was to be a proof of concept that could be reworked into cross platform API (which became Vulkan), there was plenty of work already being done by Khronos in 2014 (and Apple knew this). And they just went out and released Metal anyway.
I also blame Microsoft for the same thing, early parts of the DX12 docs were taken word for word out of the Mantle docs, that's how similar they are. But Microsoft at least had couple decades of having a competing API, but Apple went out to create a new one for some reason.
Talk about rewriting history, Mantle wasn't never supposed to become Vulkan, it only happened because AMD was generous and Khronos would otherwise still be thinking how OpenGL Next would look like.
While I get the concern, everybody's history here is backwards. Apple released Metal 2 YEARS before Vulkan. Why? Because OpenGL wasn't hacking it anymore and had become too asymmetric. Vulkan copied Metal, not the other way around.
I'm not sure they should have spun around and dropped Metal for Vulkan once it became available, or slow down the pace of progress til the rest of the market caught up. Doesn't make sense.
Also Apple is perhaps the largest GPU manufacturer in the world, with 200-250M GPUs shipped in 2017. That is 4-5X of Nvidia! Also Apple is investing highly in AI from tools to devices to GPUs, being able to customize may have tremendous value.
It is highly possible that Apple sees owning their interface stack as a means to keep their software-hardware warchest a couple years ahead of the competition. Which in mobile has been paying off of the last 5 years, as they constantly have crushed all others by 2-3X.
Does it matter anymore? People are using less and less of the higher level stuff of OpenGL. Most of the graphics code is now in the engine. OpenGL is getting very outdated, who starting a project today would chose it over Vulcan, Directx or Metal? I would bet most small shops would prefer to use some sort of middle layer or engine from a third party. That pushes the problem of implementing the lower layers in Vulcan, DirectX or Metal to a small group of specialists.
No games aren't going to target Metal to support the Mac any more than printer manufacturers are going to go out of thier way to support AirPrint to make printers Mac compatible.
What developers will do is go out of thier way to support iOS and supporting the Mac is just a side benefit. Just like almost every printer company supports the Mac as a byproduct of wanting to support iOS.
Hypothesis: There are more machines in consumer hands which support Metal than DirectX.
This may sound crazy, but remember there are billions of iOS devices out there in the world, and I don't think X boxes plus windows game machines count in the billions.
Its true Apple hasn't won the hard core gamer market, but they are no longer the niche player that had to cater to windows users.
If you're counting only gaming PCs (i.e. device used mainly for demanding 3D games) you should also count only gaming Macs/iPads/iPhones. How many are there in the world?
>This may sound crazy, but remember there are billions of iOS devices out there in the world, and I don't think X boxes plus windows game machines count in the billions.
There should do, albeit not for gaming but most of the office software is Windows with DirectX support. You won't be playing on, though.
Are there more Android devices that actually have hardware that can actually play high end games decently? The average Android phone is a low end phone - with an average selling price of $225 for all Android phones how can they not be?
OpenGL is part of the platform, they all support it. The stats page doesn't even include 'not supported' [1]
Being able to run anything slightly demanding is other thing, but you can't argue there's no support.
Also, the benchmark you linked is for application load, which is heavily influenced by storage speed and load method (android has to JIT compile sometimes) and has almost no impact from the graphics' performance other than the bus between CPU/memory and GPU
Being able to run something suboptimally doesn't turn into sales. I'm sure that the owner of a $70 Blu R1 HD is not going to be spending money on high end games.
It really isn't. The fastest GPU available is a Vega 64 underclocked to basically the performance of a normal Vega 56. A 1080Ti is ~50% faster. Even if you connect an external 1080Ti it's constrained by TB3 bandwidth.
Sure, but the whole point of both Vulkan and Metal is to bring out more performance by being lower-level. I'd assume that at least part of that benefit is lost when you use something like this.
But you have to rewrite it for every major hardware vendor, or else you won't get the performance you want.
GL should always work for the simple case, but instead you need to rewrite to avoid bugs in its many layers. And once you have Vulkan/Metal, industry-specific wrappers are better than the impossible to debug procedural GL junk.
I'm not sure I agree with the claim, but even if we take a full rewrite at face value, "every major graphics vendor" for desktop applications is NVIDIA and AMD/ATI. On mobiles, you're probably using Unity or similar middleware and therefore not thinking about bare metal (no pun intended)
Yes, but OpenGL is so outdated that the people that should use it the most (game and 3D application developers) were avoiding it due to a hardware vs. API incompatibility.
Vulcan was created to get that same portability, with an API that fits modern hardware.
All the target systems had latest Windows updates, and they all run Direct3D 11 software just fine (I mostly develop for D3D and I test on them). On some systems it works in 10.1 compatibility mode, MS calls that “feature levels”. Not a big deal in practice, the majority of D3D11 stuff still works OK.
No, you're getting stuck at 3.0 because you're hitting the deprecation strategy. You need to specifically request a post-3.0 context with wglCreateContextAttribsARB which you're not doing. Thus the system thinks you're an old legacy OpenGL app, and is giving you 3.0 as that was the last version before things were removed.
> No, you're getting stuck at 3.0 because you're hitting the deprecation strategy.
I think you’re wrong here. Two reasons.
1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
2. Please read Intel’s documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... Specifically, please expand “2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors” section. As you see in that table, Intel says HD Graphics 3000/2000 only support OpenGL 3.1, which is exactly what I’m getting from the GLEW library I’m using in that project.
Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
> 1. If that would be the case, I would be stuck with GL3.0 regardless on the GPU. In reality, I’m only stuck with GL version < 4.0 on HD2000 and VmWare. On my desktop PC (Maxwell at the time I’ve wrote that demo) OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine in that very project. Even on Intel HD 4000 laptop, OpenGL 4.0 worked just fine with the same code.
Behavior depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
> Also, you can see in that article that no intel GPU supports GL 4.6 mentioned by GP. Even the latest generation UHD Graphics 620/630 only support GL 4.5. Meanwhile, they support the latest DirectX 12 for several years already.
ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either. It still supports all the modern good stuff. And, as we've established at this point, it's not Window's stopping you from leveraging the full extent of the hardware you have. By contrast macOS does stop you from using the hardware you got to the fullest, as it's stuck on 4.1
> depends on if the device supports 3.2+ compatibility mode which is optional.
For the systems I have in this house it’s not required, i.e. I’m getting the same OpenGL version that’s advertised by the GPU vendors.
> You need to use the method I mentioned to get real post-3.0 OpenGL.
Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
> ok, so? 4.5 isn't really outdated, either.
Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is. And 4.0 is outdated, too (Intel Ivy Bridge). Meanwhile, modern Direct3D works fine on these GPUs, 11.0 feature level 10.1, and native 11.0, respectively.
> Either I don’t, or the authors of that GLEW library https://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/ already did that. When running on modern GPUs, the code in my repository already uses real post-3.0 OpenGL just fine, including the shaders.
Go read the extension I linked, it explains the behavior you're seeing. Also go read the tutorial I linked, it's using GLEW and shows you how to create a context.
You have a bug if your intention is to get a post-3.0 OpenGL context. Whether or not you care is up to you. You may be perfectly happy being in the compatibility bucket. I don't know. But you're not in the explicit 3.1 or later path.
> Right, but 3.1 (Intel Sandy Bridge) is.
Sandy Bridge is a 7 year old CPU. Of course it's outdated...? And D3D 10.1 is from 2007, it's also hugely outdated. You're getting anything more modern out of the hardware with D3D than you are OpenGL here. I don't even know what the argument you're trying to make is at this point.
No. Both ATI and Nvidia drivers include recent OpenGL versions, so OpenGL support problems are limited to actually not capable hardware.
In the old link you offer as example, Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions (hence the need to downgrade the client), and fortunately obsolete. Current Intel integrated graphics have improved. And VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
> Intel HD3000 and HD4000 are bad, with bad drivers that lie about OpenGL versions
Technically that’s probably true. However, if you drop support of Intel GPUs, your GL4+ software will no longer run on a huge count of older Windows laptops people are still using. For many kinds of software this is a bad tradeoff. That’s exactly why all modern browsers implement WebGL on top of Direct3D, and overwhelming majority of multi-platform games and 3D apps use D3D when running on Windows.
> VMware is a virtual machine, not hardware; it should be expected to be terrible.
It’s only terrible for OpenGL. The virtual GPU driver uses host GPU to render stuff, and it runs D3D11-based software just fine. I don’t use it for gaming but it’s nice to be able to use a VM to reproduce and fix bugs in my software caused by outdated OS, windows localizations, and other environmental factors.
That's not why they do that at all. They don't need anything recent from OpenGL or Direct3D, which is why they target DX9. And DX9 specifically is targetted because that also works on XP, which D3D10 doesn't.
Intel GPUs D3D drivers have historically been better than their OpenGL ones (which isn't saying much since their D3D drivers are also trash), but now we're talking driver quality of one player which has nothing to do with the API itself or opengl somehow being outdated on windows.
But ANGLE also targets desktop OpenGL (and vulkan), and as OpenGL 4.3 adoption increases I'd expect increasingly more browsers to use it for WebGL 2.0 since you don't need translation there at all. OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0.
You seem to be pretty confused on how OpenGL versions line up with the D3D ones, too. For reference OpenGL 3.1 is roughly equivalent to D3D 10.1. When you're complaining about only getting GL 3.1, you're also complaining about being stuck with D3D 10.1
I can kind of understand iOS, but it’s not like there’s a thriving graphical computing market worth locking in on the mac side. All major titles already use game engines. They’d just be locking out smaller developers who can’t invest in porting all their shaders: it’s not gonna be worth the effort.
You notice that Apple supported OpenGL while they were making most of their money from desktop and laptop sales; but once iOS became so profitable, they decided to go their own way and start pushing Metal.
Lock in, or at least getting people to do more iOS first development (helped by lower profits on app store sales on Android, Android fragmentation, etc), helps Apple out a lot. You get the first version of apps and games, or more polished versions of apps and games, on iOS this way.
Maybe.... why would you assume they continue developing for macs at all? Small studios might not have the resources, and the market is tiny for many apps, eg indie games, modeling software, and ML (to be fair, apple has repeatedly emphasized they don’t care about ML on the desktop by not offering nvidia cards...).
And again, I don’t see the benefit for apple over supporting cross platform apis to encourage development. It seems like a net loss for everyone but some line in their budget on driver maintenance.
They do make some money on Macs, and Mac software, but not nearly as much as on iOS.
Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS.
OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released.
In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal.
And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS.
And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to.
Tailored to their hardware, more modern and is written in Objective-C which makes it much easier for Mac developers to integrate in their projects, since Objective-C interface nicely with Swift and most script languages.
I've been using a cross-platform GUI framework/engine to do app development on all the platforms: Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android - and it has been a joy to deploy one app on all of these systems.
One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.
This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.
I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..
>All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
I'm not saying there aren't decent games on iOS. You can find gems like Monument Valley, Florence, or, as I mentioned, the games ported from other platforms like Limbo, Terraria, and so on. But take a look at the top charts on the iOS app store and compare that to the top games on Steam. With few exceptions, the games on iOS are riddled with ads, microtransactions, and are designed to be as addictive as possible.
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
Not if Microsoft has any say. I can't count the number of Windows Updates that re-installed the previously uninstalled Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga and March of Empires (among titles).
I played the fuck out of Angry Birds - on Android. How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? That was a rhetorical question BTW, don't even try to answer it. Apple are being arrogant as fuck with this.
>How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone?
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind.
Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better )
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming.
The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
That I certainly agree. But I do think the future are Games built on top of Game engine. Unreal seems to have a massive improvement changelog every 6 months and if Unity didn't exist I did doubt how anyone is going to compete within a reasonable budget.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
I don't expect there will ever be an AAA game presence on macOS at this point, given so few of their machines offer dedicated GPUs anymore.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
Additionally, I don't think indie developers have loads of time on their hands to port their niche games over to a new technology. I can see Unity supporting Metal, but smaller platforms (jMonkeyEngine) will have a slower adoption rate, and in that time hopefully open-source middleware will come out to handle legacy APIs.
Well, at least in the Rust ecosystem there is https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx which provides backends for Vulcan, Direct X 12, Metal and OpenGL. I'm not sure it's super relevant outside of the Rust ecosystem right now, but it's worth spreading the word around of such solutions.
All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
That of course depends on the definition of "gaming space".
The classical desktop gaming space, Apple was never a player in it. They simply don't care about it. Hence why they treated OpenGL on macOS the way they did.
But: Apple is arguably the biggest player in the mobile gaming space. That's what they care about. So instead of spending a large amount of money to attract a low number of AAA desktop titles to their OS they just tap into the vast (game-)developer base that they already have in iOS and make it easy for them to deploy and sell their games on macOS too [1].
The move to deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL in favor of Metal makes total sense in that regard.
I believe, as of now, there are more AAA games running Metal than there are running Vulkan. Pretty much every new macOS release is running Metal now, meanwhile a game running Vulkan on PC is considered a rarity.
"But by no means to they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else"
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.
Not everything that runs on OpenGL is a video game. Tons of applications out there that just won't have the budget to do a rewrite(and even fewer were probably setup with the right architecture if they were depending on OpenGL in the first place).
Indeed, I directly thought of 3d applications like Blender, Maya, etc which use OpenGL.
It's a very weird move to me, even if the software in question will be kept compatible with Apple's Legacy OpenGL, these versions will be worse than their counterparts running on other platforms making use of new shiny OpenGL features.
It's like Apple is saying 'we don't care' to the 3d professional market, also doesn't Photoshop rely on OpenGL these days as well ?
After discontinuing AutoCAD for Mac in 1994 people begged for 18 years to get it back and now Apple says "eh, we didn't want that anyway."
I heard they have a WebAssembly/WebGL version now, betting that'll get wrapped up in a WebView and we can all pretend it's a native program still.
Speaking of WebGL, that's basically OpenGL ES 2.0, but I assume the implementation in WebKit is backed by Metal? What about other browsers like Firefox?
AutoCAD is a dead technology. Architects/Stuctural Engineers/MEP Engineers are moving to BIM platforms (Revit, ArchiCAD, etc)! Product/Automotive/Industrial design and engineering use PLM tools (Catia, SolidWorks, etc). Besides, AutoCAD didn’t/doesn’t need much graphics power at all. AFAIK it never really used OpenGL.
I'm not sure about that. Or maybe Adobe just doesn't care. My 2017 Macbook Pro has horseshit graphical bugs in both Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm exclusively doing all my graphics work on my Windows 10 machine now (even though windows and my Wacom tablet do not play nice together.)
I'm in the same boat, my so called Pro machine the USB-C 2017 MBP has had glitching out completely unusable rendering on the latest version of Illustrator since October 2017. Adobe blame Apple, presumably Apple blame Adobe because neither of them are fixing it.
As if my deteriorating keys on this machine were not bad enough. This wasn't a good WWDC for me. My PC is working great despite being an obscure setup with mismatched GPUs, can't say I understand why the graphic designer workhorse machine MBP is unusable with Illustrator and that is working just fine..
microsoft changed the pen behavior in one of the creators' updates and now the pen buttons behave strangely (randomly dont work in certain applications) as well as the pen being registered as a finger in legacy applications for a while... making windows 7 the only really viable way to use wacom for a professional (speaking as one)
let alone the inability to reconfigure things like n-trig pens to have hover right click/middle click functionality, it's been INCREDIBLY frustrating without any communication from microsoft.
I've got the Intuos Pro from a couple models back. Windows Ink randomly causes pressure sensitivity to drop out (especially since the creators update.) On Windows 8 I never had trouble with the wireless adapter, now I have to run wired. Button clicks don't always register and sometimes will send the wrong input.
Overall it's rough, there are days where it seems better than others - but I'll randomly lose sensitivity and multiple reboots appears to be the only pseudo-consistent means of getting it back.
That being said - It's still way more usable than Photoshop/Illustrator on my Mac.
I miss 15 years ago when I had CS2 + Intuos Pro 2 and everything just worked.
True, but they didn't remove OpenGL, they simply deprecated it (e.g. don't expect any updates to it, new tooling will not be built around it, etc). That shouldn't affect legacy apps.
Yes, and deprecation doesn’t mean a lot on the Mac. Apple often deprecates stuff and still leaves it in. They remove it only when there’s something to be gained.
(eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
Apple can get away with that on iOS, but they're a lot more conservative with macOS.
To expand on your example, I maintain a legacy app that is stuck in 32-bit land because it relies on the QuickTime framework. QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years, and the transition to 64-bit has been in progress for over a decade, and yet my legacy app runs just fine even under the Mojave beta. There are multiple time bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted.
Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
They said in the Platform State of the Union that Mojave will be the last macOS that runs 32bit apps, so QuickTime.framework and your app are running out of time!
True — 10.12 is my recollection as well — but I’ve been bitten so many times by compiling under a new SDK, especially with an older build target, that I do that as a matter of course anyway.
I find it hard to fathom that people think a huge software company like Apple doesn’t have awareness of the impact of its changes or people responsible for compatibility.
If there isn't one already, I'm sure someone will implement OpenGL on top of Metal when it's needed badly enough. At least they're going closer to the hardware, not further away.
Why use Libre Office on a Mac when Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free (as in beer)? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a baseless argument that the Libre Office install base on the Mac is very low. On iOS it’s non-existent.
There is no way that Pages, Numbers and Keynote can open as wide a range of file formats that LibreOffice can. And there are way more features in LibreOffice.
Having used pages and word, please don't tell people to use Pages for everything.
It doesn't have the features you need when you're creating more complex documents. Last time I've used it it didn't even allow you to have different sections which allow you switch between the rotation of pages.
Every game developer I know turns off the metal rendering pipeline and uses the much more stable and refined OpenGL one unless getting every tiny bit of performance needs to be squeezed out.
I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.
I don't think it's much of an incentive. According to Valve's hardware surveys roughly 3% of Steam's market is MacOS. Those type of numbers are similar across different distribution platforms that a Unity game dev will target. It'll be hard to nudge it away from low priority with that share.
The other figure to look at is the amount of money spent. If it's similar to the hardware percentage then you're right, if on the other hand, macOS users spend more on games then a rethink is in order.
I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else. All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.