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Autodesk Drops Support For Alias, VRED In macOS Mojave Over OpenGL Deprecation (appleinsider.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the stop-drop-and-roll dept.

"Autodesk has published a support document announcing that it is stopping development of its Alias and VRED vertical market packages, and that older versions will not work on Mojave due to Apple's OpenGL deprecation," writes Stephen Silver for Apple Insider. Alias is software predominantly used in automotive design and industrial design, while VRED is 3D visualization software. From the report: According to a note posted on Autodesk's support website, while older Alias versions can run on High Sierra or earlier, "no versions of VRED will run on that operating system due to the OpenGL deprecation." The change, according to the Autodesk note, "allows Autodesk development teams to focus on bringing innovations to market faster, and allows for more frequent software updates." "In the end, the entire Alias and VRED community will benefit from this streamlined approach," wrote the company.

This follows the announcement by Apple in June at WWDC that Mojave will require graphics hardware to support Metal, and that active development has ceased for OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac. It isn't clear why Autodesk made the declaration that OpenGL's deprecation was responsible for the applications not working in Mojave. Deprecation does not mean removed, and the existing OpenGL implementation in High Sierra remains in Mojave. The move at present does not appear to affect the core AutoDesk product.

8 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Deprecation may not mean "removed" by Gojira+Shipi-Taro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But it sure as fuck means the OS publisher isn't supporting it. If I"m making a product that requires support from the publisher for bugs, security issues, or what have you for a given module, and they drop it on the floor, I drop them on the floor. I'm not going on the hook for something that isn't supported. Not worth the fucking time.

    --
    "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
  2. The Customer is Always Right (original meaning) by LaughingRadish · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The original meaning of "The Customer is Always Right" stems from demand for a product, not the parades of boorish people so often seen quoting this adage. More specifically, if customers demand a certain product, then that's the product that should be made. Apple is attempting to cram down the throats of the users something the users don't want.

  3. LLVM by JBMcB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's why they don't use gcc anymore.

    No, now they use LLVM/CLANG, which they also don't develop, though they contribute quite a bit to it's development.

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
    1. Re:LLVM by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, now they use LLVM/CLANG, which they also don't develop, though they contribute quite a bit to it's development.

      No Apple didn't initially develop LLVM but they have contributed significantly to it as you've noted. The main reason Apple doesn't use gcc anymore is that they felt there were not getting enough support from the GNU Project. Since Objective-C has much smaller base than C or C++, many of the changes and optimizations Apple wanted for their languages wasn't being done as quickly as they wanted. I suspect also that making those kinds of changes would have broken many things for other languages. So Apple went with another compiler. Same story with WebKit.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    2. Re:LLVM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The reason they abandoned gcc is because of the GPL.

      The reason they abandoned gcc (and other GNU programs) is GPLv3, most likely because of the anti-Tivoization clause. Notice how GNU programs in OSX (if there are still any) are all very old versions, right before they switch to GPLv3.

      Apple would rather give their customers ancient software than loosen their grip on the iThings.

  4. Re:Apple doesn't have market share to push Metal by exomondo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don’t the big engines already support Metal? Unreal, Unity, etc.? Last I checked they all already support it.

    Yep they do.

    Vulkan will hopefully receive third-party support on macOS and perhaps iOS eventually

    It's already there. Instead of just breaking from Khronos and going off and doing their own thing it would have made sense to contribute Metal to Khronos as an industry standard, or at least make it an open spec.

  5. Re:Anyone know why Apple's dropping OpenGL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OpenGL is shit and has always been shit. It has a convoluted API that was designed around configuring fixed-function 3D rasterisers and is ill-suited to programmable GPUs, multi-threading and has extremely high overhead for modern graphics pipelines from the multitude of function calls and GPU state validations.

    Metal, Vulkan, D3D12 are all very similar in the way they offer lightweight APIs that are a minimal abstraction of modern programmable GPUs and are designed to work in multi-threaded, multi-process environments.

    In my opinion as a crusty old games developer, all of the new-generation APIs are inspired by Sony/Nvidia's GCM library from the PlayStation 3, which in itself draws upon the PlayStation 2's GS & DMAC libraries.

  6. Re:Anyone know why Apple's dropping OpenGL by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    OpenGL is shit and has always been shit. It has a convoluted API that was designed around configuring fixed-function 3D rasterisers and is ill-suited to programmable GPUs, multi-threading and has extremely high overhead for modern graphics pipelines from the multitude of function calls and GPU state validations.

    Metal, Vulkan, D3D12 are all very similar in the way they offer lightweight APIs that are a minimal abstraction of modern programmable GPUs and are designed to work in multi-threaded, multi-process environments.

    Correct. OpenGL is an antique API - if you have a modern high end video card (like a GTX 1050 or higher) OpenGL will run like crap on it - it just has too much overhead causing most of the power to go underutilized.

    The big problem is what OS X is going to use - Metal, Vulkan and the like all came out around the same time because of the issues of OpenGL One should note when Metal came out, Vulkan was actually AMD's API set - it was donated to Khronos to offer a standardized next-generation API set, and renamed to Vulkan. We are in a huge transition period where legacy apps will need to be ported over to take advantage of modern video card performance.