Deprecating their sad 5 year old OpenGL implementation is ok, but I wish they natively supported Vulkan now that they're doing that. There's a Vulkan over Metal bridge but it has limits, and then there's the install base issues.
It isn't about being cross-platform. It is all about giving Apple's customers the best experience. And Metal simply is better. It doesn't have to make compromises for other platforms. It can concentrate on creating the best graphics and compute API for Apple's operating systems and hardware. Apple can quickly modify Metal as it sees fit to improve performance. Apple cannot modify OpenCL as easily since it requires a committee decision. Apple is going for custom hardware, custom software to get the best performance. Just witness how far ahead Apple is in Smartphone processing speed compared to its competitors. It is Apple's combination of deep hardware and software integration that makes it possible. Apple is about creating a fully custom platform that pleases its customers.
What a weird way to phrase what you mean. It's the most lucrative mobile platform. It's not "only for one platform." Your choice of words is even more so odd because there are only two relevant mobile platforms.
"It's the most lucrative mobile platform." Huh? Android has an 85% market share against iOS worldwide but even in the US Android commands a decent 53-to-42 (10%+) lead against Apple.
Yeah, but despite that lead iOS commands the "lucrativeness" and "exclusivity" aspects because it's customers don't mind paying a ton of cash, and regularly do, for things Android users get for free.
Don't get me wrong, I think this move by Apple to ditch OGL in favor of their own implementation is bad, but it also makes sense from their standpoint. We will see what the long term outcome will be.
Yeah, well that "deep hardware and software integration" locks people in their ecosystem and while on the smartphone they are on the high end of performance with very little if any lead compared to high end Androids on the PC side they are just above average... and 0 upgrade path.
Yes but it may not stay that way when they can't get all the stuff their friends can. Keep in mind that a project is going to be choosing between a system that supports Apple or Windows, Linux, Android, Consoles, etc. Someone mentioned that Apple's customers tend to be willing to pay more for the same thing but if your developing a game (and that's the majority of people using these api's at this level) you aren't going to want to lose the Windows and console markets. Therefore you have to decide if it's really going to pay to develop two versions and if so which are you going to put most of your development effort towards. Any games that end up on both platforms will probably not perform as well on Apple because they will be a smaller portion of the user base.
How would this change by sticking with OpenGL? It's not like a game for iOS with OpenGL will now run on Android if you switched to a Pixel. This changes the consumer's "upgrade path" by absolutely nothing. It might make it game developers work harder, but chances are this will make them not want to come to iOS once this becomes a requirement and may result in higher costs for iOS App Store games if there's more cost involved to make it, which would go against your claims since it could push some out to Android as a result.
You are missing the point. Metal is a low-level API with high performance at the cost of high complexity, but when you license a game engine that already supports it then you don't have to bother much with that complexity. OpenGL is a high-level API that may not be the best performer but is easier to write program for and programs use it directly without going through a third-party engine. But Macintosh is not relevant for gaming anyway! Pretty all Macs are underpowered for the latest AAA games. Metal on macOS is primarily for helping development of iOS games on Mac. Otherwise, people use Macs for creating content, using complex applications with tens of thousands of lines of code that are tied to OpenGL. Those apps are not going to be rewritten to use Metal, they are simply going to drop Mac support, and the Mac users they had are going to convert to MS Windows. That is were Apple is going to get hurt!
iOS is exceptionally lucrative for game developers, and uses Metal. Metal isn't going anywhere.
However, porting iOS games to Android will be more difficult since developers will have to cope with device fragmentation *and* a different graphics API, so games like Fortnight that have been on iOS for a while now will be even slower to appear on Android.
I suspect that most mobile titles are developed for Android first (due to the much larger number of potential sales because of the larger number of people using it) and then ported to iOS rather than the reverse being true so the lack of OpenGL support will hurt iOS more than delay a program from appearing in the Play Store.
The opposite is true. Developing for iOS is less expensive, and iOS users tend to be more willing to pay for games instead of stealing... ahem... I mean sideloading them.
I created an account just to reply to your comment.. No. iOS development is not less expensive. Not only can you develop games for Android on ANY OS that you currently have, Linux, Windows, Mac, but the developer license is $25 one time fee.
With iOS, it's $100/year, and you LEGALLY have to develop on a Mac, so if you don't have one, be prepared to dish out an extra HUGE amount of money ($2000?) so if you're an indie dev that doesn't have a mac? Oh well.. And if you really don't like Mac world? Wow, then you're only buying that computer JUST to build iOS apps for it.
Apple really doesn't like playing nice with others when it comes to developers. So yes, as a Game Developer, I'm going to say it is not true, and you lied. Please look into facts first before you post a message stating something. :)
Rubbish. The open standards define an api, not an implementation. If Apple finds a way to do something more optimally, that can happen behind the API. If Apple wants to add new functionality, they could do so via an extra library. Both their OpenGL implementation and the extra library could talk directly to hardware, or Metal - allowing developers who want to compile cross-platform to use OpenGL and developers who want to make titles exclusively for Mac (ha!) to do so with their own Metal API. Already gamers bear the brunt of dx vs OpenGL. This will be bad for the consumer - existing games will stop working and won't be ported (publishers have zero benefit to doing so) - new games are less likely to come to macos - devs already have either OpenGL or dx experience or both - unless engines like Unreal and Unity support it, and then that's not good for healthy game engine competition - this is likely to impact Linux gaming to as the argument to support because of similarity (at least in graphics API) to macos goes away.
As with so many Apple decisions, it's the consumer who loses out here. Apple are taking a leaf out of the 1995 Microsoft playbook.
OpenGL allows for extensions which in turn allow GPU makers a means of exposing new functionality. However, it's a clumsy approach and you end up needing to have code paths for each type of video card. Not ideal. Further, OpenGL is old and fundamentally different in terms of the instruction pipeline. Think of it this way, to draw a scene in OpenGL, the CPU needs to send the GPU a bunch of different commands to make that happen. With more modern APIs like Metal, Vulkan, etc. the CPU sends the GPU a scene description and the GPU figures out all of the details to make it happen. These results in far fewer draw calls and better overall performance.
The fact is, Apple was burned by OpenGL moving at a snails pace. So, they did they only thing they could to improve the problem and that was to role their own API. Vulkan followed and shares similar design goals, but it is considerably further behind in terms of maturity and development. The bottom line is that users get the best experience when developers use Metal. The popularity of the platform will determine if it is worth the effort of developers to do so.
You can do the same thing that Google did with Chrome on Windows.
>ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) is an open sourced graphics engine abstraction layer developed by Google that translates OpenGL calls to Direct3D.
Microsoft has even created their own fork of the project.
This is one of the main reasons I can't get behind Apple. They artificially limit choice by restricting technologies which are widely utilized by others. Limiting choice only hurts the consumer. I can only hope the industry takes notice and doesn't cater to Apple's forced decision.
What choice is artificially limited? It's not like there is no porting effort required just because apps use a common API like OpenGL. There is either a business decision to target Apple's platform or not. Over the past several years, pretty much any application that matters has embraced Metal on Apple's platforms. All of the major gaming engines support it as well.
OpenGL was fine in it's day, however for many years now, it has held Apple back. It was time to move on.
"It's not like there is no porting effort required just because apps use a common API like OpenGL."
Correct, but now there is _more_ porting effort to bring programs over to Apple which will further marginalize and isolate Apple from mainstream computing. As you implied already porting goes from some other platform to Apple which already indicates where Apple stands in the human centipede of the computer industry as viewed by software developers.
"Over the past several years, pretty much any application that matters has embraced Metal on Apple's platforms."
I wouldn't be so quick to speak in absolute terms. It's a perilous matter to presume to speak for everyone else by claiming what matters to them has already been moved to Metal.
I'd suggest that you're also missing some market realities. Cross platform APIs sound like a nice idea, but in practice, take Apple out of the equation and what do you really have? Microsoft has their own DirectX APIs and nobody seems to complain about that. Apple tried very had to champion OpenCL and yet developers have preferred to use the proprietary CUDA. The same goes for Metal. Metal will always be better on Apple's platforms than Vulcan, OpenGL, OpenCL could ever be. Why? Because they can optimize for their specific use cases and hardware.
So no official Vulkan,OpenGL and off course no DX which is all understandable for their mobile offerings. But all this plus no openCL for macOS. Low level API's are fine but making it the only option? The circle continues in the IT-industry , Make something lacking functionality/abstraction -> add functionality/abstraction -> wonder if it is to bloated -> Make something new lacking functionality/abstraction -> .....
When coding a Mac or iOS app, you can either work directly with Metal, or use MetalKit, a higher level toolkit based on Metal. So Apple has an abstraction layer above Metal that uses Metal as its foundation
More accurately - it is about locking developers and customers even more tightly to Apple. Smaller developers will not have the resources to support 2 different graphics APIs and so may get locked into Apple thereby providing it with some exclusive games. From Apple's point of view they drop their costs by .001% and get some locked in customers. This is entirely about customer lock-in not about improving the customers experience.
Eh? No All the Unity or Unreal games run on Metal right now - Apple has never had OpenGLES 3.1 so you need Metal to run compute shaders.
This really won't affect mobile games at all - it will affect creative code communities and other games _eventually_ but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
It's inconvenient for me personally (as someone who writes games and knows openGL and not Metal) but it's the right thing for Apple to do for their platform.
The Unreal engine predates Metal by a great many years as the original Unreal game that formed the basis of the engine was released in 1998. It could not have possibly supported Metal at that point unless you're talking about S3's MeTaL API that came out around the time the Savage 3D graphics card was released. Except portions of that API as related to texture compression found their way into DirectX after Microsoft licensed the technology from S3.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Apple specifically worked with the game engine companies and helped them port their engines to Metal for both of Apple's platforms. As for the Unreal engine specifically, try doing a little research. https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Metal_Rendering_API
Windows remains the best OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan platform going forward. You don't need to switch to Metal, you just need to dump macos and switch to Windows.
True enough since you specified performance per dollar, but that's not the only metric. They optimize for 'niceness' instead and don't fare too badly per dollar there imo. Performance vs size vs battery life vs structural rigidity, plus macOS and the trackpad, etc.
A lot more, Microsoft disallowed OpenGL only on apps being sold in the Microsoft Store, you can still download an app online and use it. Also, if you need to run OpenGL code, you can use ANGLE which is actively contributed to by Microsoft.
On the other hand, Apple is most likely completely removing OpenGL from all of their platforms requiring developers to completely rewrite their software. They haven't provided a date for the removal.
Forcing software to switch from 32 to 64 lost some software tools and titles from the ecosystem - but in their place will materialise software that is more efficiently using the system resources.
Forcing Apps to use Metal will have a short term effect of limiting new titles to those with greater resources to develope Metal expertise (or use engines or frameworks that already do themselves). In the long term it could result in less system resources required to do the same task - and/or the system having higher fps,
AJ
For Compute, GPU and AR & ML - Apple are ware best place to work out how to hardware accelerate
err Typo : As Apple have a frenetic SoC Hw development team - and a rapidly expanding GPU / AI / ML team - then perhaps Metal (or OS calls) will be needed in the future to fully utilise the system - in ways that OpenGL & OpenCl cannot keep up with?
Apple has taken another step to ensure user lock-in and incompatibility, which allows it to charge very high prices and cultivate an exclusive brand image. Apple seems to have declared war on its own users, yet its users seem to defend its actions at every turn. I almost find it a fascinating it a fascinating psychological study in Stockholm Syndrome where its users endlessly defend their abuser and attack people for pointing out the abuse.
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tipoo - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Deprecating their sad 5 year old OpenGL implementation is ok, but I wish they natively supported Vulkan now that they're doing that. There's a Vulkan over Metal bridge but it has limits, and then there's the install base issues.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
I can't possibly see how this makes sense. Removing all cross-platform support for graphics APIs is insanejameskatt - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
It isn't about being cross-platform. It is all about giving Apple's customers the best experience. And Metal simply is better. It doesn't have to make compromises for other platforms. It can concentrate on creating the best graphics and compute API for Apple's operating systems and hardware. Apple can quickly modify Metal as it sees fit to improve performance. Apple cannot modify OpenCL as easily since it requires a committee decision. Apple is going for custom hardware, custom software to get the best performance. Just witness how far ahead Apple is in Smartphone processing speed compared to its competitors. It is Apple's combination of deep hardware and software integration that makes it possible. Apple is about creating a fully custom platform that pleases its customers.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
I mean, you're not technically wrong. However, if it is only for one platform, developers are less likely to use it, which hurts consumers.baka_toroi - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
"if it is only for one platform"What a weird way to phrase what you mean. It's the most lucrative mobile platform. It's not "only for one platform." Your choice of words is even more so odd because there are only two relevant mobile platforms.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
This isn't just for mobile platforms. It affects desktops too.T2k - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
"It's the most lucrative mobile platform." Huh? Android has an 85% market share against iOS worldwide but even in the US Android commands a decent 53-to-42 (10%+) lead against Apple.niva - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Yeah, but despite that lead iOS commands the "lucrativeness" and "exclusivity" aspects because it's customers don't mind paying a ton of cash, and regularly do, for things Android users get for free.Don't get me wrong, I think this move by Apple to ditch OGL in favor of their own implementation is bad, but it also makes sense from their standpoint. We will see what the long term outcome will be.
Strunf - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Yeah, well that "deep hardware and software integration" locks people in their ecosystem and while on the smartphone they are on the high end of performance with very little if any lead compared to high end Androids on the PC side they are just above average... and 0 upgrade path.baka_toroi - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
You make it seem their consumers care about the locked-ecosystem approach. The only upgrade path for an iPhone user is the next iPhone.starcrusade - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Yes but it may not stay that way when they can't get all the stuff their friends can. Keep in mind that a project is going to be choosing between a system that supports Apple or Windows, Linux, Android, Consoles, etc. Someone mentioned that Apple's customers tend to be willing to pay more for the same thing but if your developing a game (and that's the majority of people using these api's at this level) you aren't going to want to lose the Windows and console markets. Therefore you have to decide if it's really going to pay to develop two versions and if so which are you going to put most of your development effort towards. Any games that end up on both platforms will probably not perform as well on Apple because they will be a smaller portion of the user base.solipsism - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
How would this change by sticking with OpenGL? It's not like a game for iOS with OpenGL will now run on Android if you switched to a Pixel. This changes the consumer's "upgrade path" by absolutely nothing. It might make it game developers work harder, but chances are this will make them not want to come to iOS once this becomes a requirement and may result in higher costs for iOS App Store games if there's more cost involved to make it, which would go against your claims since it could push some out to Android as a result.id4andrei - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
That how DirectX and CUDA both work. That's why they both curently smoke Metal and OpenCL.Findecanor - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
You are missing the point. Metal is a low-level API with high performance at the cost of high complexity, but when you license a game engine that already supports it then you don't have to bother much with that complexity. OpenGL is a high-level API that may not be the best performer but is easier to write program for and programs use it directly without going through a third-party engine.But Macintosh is not relevant for gaming anyway! Pretty all Macs are underpowered for the latest AAA games. Metal on macOS is primarily for helping development of iOS games on Mac.
Otherwise, people use Macs for creating content, using complex applications with tens of thousands of lines of code that are tied to OpenGL. Those apps are not going to be rewritten to use Metal, they are simply going to drop Mac support, and the Mac users they had are going to convert to MS Windows.
That is were Apple is going to get hurt!
BillBear - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
iOS is exceptionally lucrative for game developers, and uses Metal. Metal isn't going anywhere.However, porting iOS games to Android will be more difficult since developers will have to cope with device fragmentation *and* a different graphics API, so games like Fortnight that have been on iOS for a while now will be even slower to appear on Android.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
I suspect that most mobile titles are developed for Android first (due to the much larger number of potential sales because of the larger number of people using it) and then ported to iOS rather than the reverse being true so the lack of OpenGL support will hurt iOS more than delay a program from appearing in the Play Store.BillBear - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
The opposite is true. Developing for iOS is less expensive, and iOS users tend to be more willing to pay for games instead of stealing... ahem... I mean sideloading them.CyRaid - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I created an account just to reply to your comment.. No. iOS development is not less expensive.Not only can you develop games for Android on ANY OS that you currently have, Linux, Windows, Mac, but the developer license is $25 one time fee.
With iOS, it's $100/year, and you LEGALLY have to develop on a Mac, so if you don't have one, be prepared to dish out an extra HUGE amount of money ($2000?) so if you're an indie dev that doesn't have a mac? Oh well.. And if you really don't like Mac world? Wow, then you're only buying that computer JUST to build iOS apps for it.
Apple really doesn't like playing nice with others when it comes to developers. So yes, as a Game Developer, I'm going to say it is not true, and you lied. Please look into facts first before you post a message stating something. :)
tipoo - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - link
Metal commonality will help iOS to Mac ports.I wish it also had Vulkan for Windows/Linux to Mac ports.
xpusostomos - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
Not everyone wants to play what you call AAA games.fux0r - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - link
Rubbish. The open standards define an api, not an implementation. If Apple finds a way to do something more optimally, that can happen behind the API. If Apple wants to add new functionality, they could do so via an extra library. Both their OpenGL implementation and the extra library could talk directly to hardware, or Metal - allowing developers who want to compile cross-platform to use OpenGL and developers who want to make titles exclusively for Mac (ha!) to do so with their own Metal API. Already gamers bear the brunt of dx vs OpenGL. This will be bad for the consumer- existing games will stop working and won't be ported (publishers have zero benefit to doing so)
- new games are less likely to come to macos - devs already have either OpenGL or dx experience or both - unless engines like Unreal and Unity support it, and then that's not good for healthy game engine competition
- this is likely to impact Linux gaming to as the argument to support because of similarity (at least in graphics API) to macos goes away.
As with so many Apple decisions, it's the consumer who loses out here. Apple are taking a leaf out of the 1995 Microsoft playbook.
techconc - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
OpenGL allows for extensions which in turn allow GPU makers a means of exposing new functionality. However, it's a clumsy approach and you end up needing to have code paths for each type of video card. Not ideal. Further, OpenGL is old and fundamentally different in terms of the instruction pipeline. Think of it this way, to draw a scene in OpenGL, the CPU needs to send the GPU a bunch of different commands to make that happen. With more modern APIs like Metal, Vulkan, etc. the CPU sends the GPU a scene description and the GPU figures out all of the details to make it happen. These results in far fewer draw calls and better overall performance.The fact is, Apple was burned by OpenGL moving at a snails pace. So, they did they only thing they could to improve the problem and that was to role their own API. Vulkan followed and shares similar design goals, but it is considerably further behind in terms of maturity and development. The bottom line is that users get the best experience when developers use Metal. The popularity of the platform will determine if it is worth the effort of developers to do so.
xpusostomos - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
Users get the best experience when the program they own runs. Funny that.BillBear - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
You can do the same thing that Google did with Chrome on Windows.>ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) is an open sourced graphics engine abstraction layer developed by Google that translates OpenGL calls to Direct3D.
Microsoft has even created their own fork of the project.
hosps - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
This is one of the main reasons I can't get behind Apple. They artificially limit choice by restricting technologies which are widely utilized by others. Limiting choice only hurts the consumer. I can only hope the industry takes notice and doesn't cater to Apple's forced decision.techconc - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
What choice is artificially limited? It's not like there is no porting effort required just because apps use a common API like OpenGL. There is either a business decision to target Apple's platform or not. Over the past several years, pretty much any application that matters has embraced Metal on Apple's platforms. All of the major gaming engines support it as well.OpenGL was fine in it's day, however for many years now, it has held Apple back. It was time to move on.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
"It's not like there is no porting effort required just because apps use a common API like OpenGL."Correct, but now there is _more_ porting effort to bring programs over to Apple which will further marginalize and isolate Apple from mainstream computing. As you implied already porting goes from some other platform to Apple which already indicates where Apple stands in the human centipede of the computer industry as viewed by software developers.
"Over the past several years, pretty much any application that matters has embraced Metal on Apple's platforms."
I wouldn't be so quick to speak in absolute terms. It's a perilous matter to presume to speak for everyone else by claiming what matters to them has already been moved to Metal.
techconc - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
I'd suggest that you're also missing some market realities. Cross platform APIs sound like a nice idea, but in practice, take Apple out of the equation and what do you really have? Microsoft has their own DirectX APIs and nobody seems to complain about that. Apple tried very had to champion OpenCL and yet developers have preferred to use the proprietary CUDA. The same goes for Metal. Metal will always be better on Apple's platforms than Vulcan, OpenGL, OpenCL could ever be. Why? Because they can optimize for their specific use cases and hardware.GreenReaper - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Oh yeah? Deprecate this! *throws teapot at the wall, shattering it into shards of volcanic metalloids*plopke - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
So no official Vulkan,OpenGL and off course no DX which is all understandable for their mobile offerings. But all this plus no openCL for macOS. Low level API's are fine but making it the only option?The circle continues in the IT-industry , Make something lacking functionality/abstraction -> add functionality/abstraction -> wonder if it is to bloated -> Make something new lacking functionality/abstraction -> .....
casperes1996 - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
When coding a Mac or iOS app, you can either work directly with Metal, or use MetalKit, a higher level toolkit based on Metal. So Apple has an abstraction layer above Metal that uses Metal as its foundationDuncan Macdonald - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
More accurately - it is about locking developers and customers even more tightly to Apple. Smaller developers will not have the resources to support 2 different graphics APIs and so may get locked into Apple thereby providing it with some exclusive games. From Apple's point of view they drop their costs by .001% and get some locked in customers. This is entirely about customer lock-in not about improving the customers experience.baka_toroi - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
The only way out in this scenario is for multi-platform SDKs (Unity?) to include support for Metal.techconc - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
All of the major engines such as Unity, Unreal, etc. have supported Metal from day 1.haukionkannel - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
But how Many games has been done to support metal... not Many, so Expect to see very few games in iOs devices in the short run...evilliam - Friday, June 8, 2018 - link
Eh?No
All the Unity or Unreal games run on Metal right now - Apple has never had OpenGLES 3.1 so you need Metal to run compute shaders.
This really won't affect mobile games at all - it will affect creative code communities and other games _eventually_ but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
It's inconvenient for me personally (as someone who writes games and knows openGL and not Metal) but it's the right thing for Apple to do for their platform.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
The Unreal engine predates Metal by a great many years as the original Unreal game that formed the basis of the engine was released in 1998. It could not have possibly supported Metal at that point unless you're talking about S3's MeTaL API that came out around the time the Savage 3D graphics card was released. Except portions of that API as related to texture compression found their way into DirectX after Microsoft licensed the technology from S3.techconc - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Apple specifically worked with the game engine companies and helped them port their engines to Metal for both of Apple's platforms. As for the Unreal engine specifically, try doing a little research.https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Metal_Rendering_API
id4andrei - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Windows remains the best OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan platform going forward. You don't need to switch to Metal, you just need to dump macos and switch to Windows.T2k - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Yes and on top of that you get a lot more bang (performance) for your buck on PC, Apple's mediocre hardware is laughably overpriced.tipoo - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - link
True enough since you specified performance per dollar, but that's not the only metric. They optimize for 'niceness' instead and don't fare too badly per dollar there imo. Performance vs size vs battery life vs structural rigidity, plus macOS and the trackpad, etc.BillBear - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Am I supposed to be more or less alarmed than I was when Microsoft disallowed OpenGL for Microsoft Store apps and apps on Windows 10 Arm?olafgarten - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
A lot more, Microsoft disallowed OpenGL only on apps being sold in the Microsoft Store, you can still download an app online and use it. Also, if you need to run OpenGL code, you can use ANGLE which is actively contributed to by Microsoft.On the other hand, Apple is most likely completely removing OpenGL from all of their platforms requiring developers to completely rewrite their software. They haven't provided a date for the removal.
BillBear - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Yes, and just like ANGLE translates OpenGL to Direct3D, there are layers that translate OpenGL to Metal.The Vulkan folks have already announced a layer to translate Vulkan to Metal.
If Apple is doomed because of this, so is Microsoft.
AJ_NEWMAN - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Forcing software to switch from 32 to 64 lost some software tools and titles from the ecosystem - but in their place will materialise software that is more efficiently using the system resources.Forcing Apps to use Metal will have a short term effect of limiting new titles to those with greater resources to develope Metal expertise (or use engines or frameworks that already do themselves). In the long term it could result in less system resources required to do the same task - and/or the system having higher fps,
AJ
For Compute, GPU and AR & ML - Apple are ware best place to work out how to hardware accelerate
AJ_NEWMAN - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
err Typo : As Apple have a frenetic SoC Hw development team - and a rapidly expanding GPU / AI / ML team - then perhaps Metal (or OS calls) will be needed in the future to fully utilise the system - in ways that OpenGL & OpenCl cannot keep up with?evilliam - Friday, June 8, 2018 - link
this.tipoo - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - link
They're not expecting everyone to use the low level language, there's MetalKit that bridges the gap to a higher level abstraction. Like GNM vs GNMX.boozed - Thursday, June 7, 2018 - link
\m/amosbatto - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
Apple has taken another step to ensure user lock-in and incompatibility, which allows it to charge very high prices and cultivate an exclusive brand image. Apple seems to have declared war on its own users, yet its users seem to defend its actions at every turn. I almost find it a fascinating it a fascinating psychological study in Stockholm Syndrome where its users endlessly defend their abuser and attack people for pointing out the abuse.xpusostomos - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
Apple is still a tiny trillion dollar company. You can't expect them to have the resources to give a high level of support to users like Microsoft.Scarii - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link
can someone send me the link for the download of metal for mac.Thanks