mattinoz

roundaboutnow said:

wizard69 said:

mjtomlin said:

tylersdad said:

This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.

The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.

Two things...

First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.

Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.

It is my understanding that Vulkan and Metal are very similar, possibly developed from the same code base.    Im not a 3D graphics programmer so i can't say from experience from using the 2 APIs.  If true there is very little in the way of shimming required.  

As for OpenGL the problem there is that CAD and engineering software businesses depend upon it and had enough control over the development process to prevent OpenGL modernization.   The gaming industry on the other hand rushed to leave OpenGL behind.    This is almost completely due to performance issues with OpenGL, basically game developers want as much performance as they can get.  

On the otherhand developers of engineering and visulization software are more concerned about stability, correctness and other issues.   I suspect that most of these developers will leave OpenGL behind for Vulkan at some point.   They simply are not in a rush and frankly Vulkan needs to stabilize.   So what im saying here is that i expect Vulkan to be the industry standard moving forward.   That means API translation libraries for Apples Metal for non game related apps.  

Mike Wuerthele said:

...

And OpenGL is not wiped from macOS yet. It's just been officially deprecated after years of neglect. It's still in Mojave.

There are already reports that Autocad 2018 works fine on Mojave beta. Whether this is because OpenGL is still in Mojave as Mike said, or they are already supporting Metal, I don't know. Autodesk has announced a "One AutoCAD" strategy when AutoCAD 2019 was released (Windows only for now), so I think (hope) Autodesk is keeping an eye on the future, and cross-platform compatibility (incl. web and mobile platforms).

PS: Mac releases of AutoCAD are of necessity tied to Apple's macOS releases, so we might not see the Mac 2019 version until...2019?

anton zuykov said:

netrox said:

Wait a minute, Apple is being fined because someone had their phone repaired outside of authorized dealership?!?! What kind of stupid decision is that?

'stralia.... It is right to repair to the extreme, I guess. Basically, no matter what a shitty job a repairman did, your product must work, which makes zero sense when data security concerns are brought in.

rcfa said:

As much as performance is great, part of the appeal of the Mac was superior compliance with open industry standards.

Looks like Apple feels iOS’ market penetration gives it enough clout to start acting like M$ and simply become ever more proprietary. Sad.

Apple could have either worked within standards bodies to move OpenGL/OpenCL towards Metal, create an OpenGL/OpenCL API on top of Metal, or opened up Metal like they opened up Swift for industry-wide adoption.

nunzy said:

That thing would look like a dinner plate if you held it up to your head. 6.5 inches? No thanks.