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Autodesk Drops Support For Alias, VRED In macOS Mojave Over OpenGL Deprecation (appleinsider.com)
"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.
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.
Apple should have some sort of a system where the GPU drivers can install their own OpenGL stack, similar to the ICD in Windows.
It boggles my mind how much money that company has and how poorly written OS X seems to not be able to do the things Windows has been able to do for a decade or more. I'm surprised Autodesk didn't just drop support for OS X entirely and tell Apple to piss off. They actually deserve it this time, especially considering what a clusterfuck Metal 2 is (and it still doesn't support everything OpenGL 4.5 does- nor will it ever, according to Apple- nice mobile API you back ported to the desktop there).
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
Can't they just use Vulkan?
The most logical reason is that Apple doesn't want to put the development of a crucial part of their OS in someone else's hands. It's why they don't use gcc anymore. And why they developed their own web browser.
Fuck Metal, anyway. It's like DirectX but nobody worth a damn fucking uses it.
Nobody but the millions of Mac and iOS users.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
Really, no one is using Apple for high-end CAD anymore because the hardware sucks.
Apple is not for professionals anyway.
Soon it won't be for amateurs either.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Ever tried to use Vulkan? Even Carmack is calling for an API on top of the Vulkan API. Not sure who is moving to direct Vulkan but most likely it'll end up being a buggy mess (manual memory management in large projects?) and the same reason OpenGL "lost" to DX in the early 2000s.
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probably not.
They refused to support java on mobile, and lost virtually all their market share in a decade.
refusing to support vulkan just means they get shut out of the Vr wave.
Apple isn't dying, its dead already, just gonna take a bit longer for Goldman Sachs to unwind their positions.
No they don't but the developers who write software for them care. Have you talked to any of them? My conversations with them lead me to the following conclusions. The good thing about OpenGL is that it's not going anywhere (stable). The bad thing about OpenGL is that it's not going anywhere (stagnant). The good thing about Metal is that it is what Vulkan should be in terms of ease of use and function. The bad thing about Metal is that it is only macOS/iOS. The good thing about Vulkan is that it is cross-platform. The bad thing is that it's very finicky to use.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not sure who is moving to direct Vulkan but most likely it'll end up being a buggy mess
Unity, Unreal, IdTech6 are some pretty big names that have Vulkan support just fine. Unity even has it for its Android version.
manual memory management in large projects?
Yes, where do you get the idea that memory is just magically managed for you in OpenGL (or Metal)? You realize you still need to allocate and deallocate buffers in OpenGL and check whether the allocation does indeed succeed, the basics of memory management. In OpenGL the default behaviour for the driver is to shuffle memory in and out of vram and system ram in oversubscription cases, if you're fine with that performance loss and want OpenGL-like behaviour you can store your resources in host-local type buffers in Vulkan or MTLStorageModeShared in Metal but having control of this at the engine/middleware level (maybe not so much the application level) rather than leaving it purely to the driver is a good thing. Drivers are bloating out with application-specific optimizations simply because the developers know what they want but aren't afforded that level of control in OpenGL.
A Mac Book with touch bar has no ESC key. ...
Which you clearly can see on the article you linked
It might have an "ESC - area" on the touchbar, though.
As a 'vi' user: that is out of the question.
Having no F-keys is out of the question as well for heavy game play.
Yes: I have a Mac, and yes, I play games on it, and yes, I map commands to function keys.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you can't seek support from your library vendors, then it's completely understandable to drop support for the platform. This is exactly what anyone with half a mind knew was going to happen when Apple announced they were dropping support for OpenGL.
Which part of your fevered imagination makes you think that supporting standards amounts to being beholden?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The main reason Apple dropped GCC was because of the GPL3. Both the patent clauses and the anti-DRM clauses in it are bad for Apple (they need to be able to lock down the iOS devices and they need to be able to enforce their patents)
When vendors develop their own 3D graphics implementations, the result is always horrible. For example, 3fdx created glide. It sucked, so only a few companies added support for it to their engines. iD didn't bother. Instead, 3dfx wound up having to support the parts of opengl used by iD, and they called it minigl. Sadly, this came too late... Because Microsoft had time in the interim to create direct3d. As we all know, d3d went through many revisions before it was worth one tenth of one shit. Up until 7, IIRC, you could not even plot a pixel on top of a d3d window without resorting to GDI. Now Apple wants to have their own 3d API and apple users are in for a world of hurt, as this announcement demonstrates. Instead of simply continuing to use opengl until vulkan meets their standards, they've created yet another incompatible standard. Opengl permits vendor customization via vendor extensions, like e.g. multitexture used to be (SGIS_MULTITEXTURE, anyone?) But there was no good reason for Apple to rush to a new standard while developers were still happily using the old one. They did it anyway, and now their customers have to suffer — as do developers. If they are developing a cross-platform application, they now have no choice but to support multiple APIs... Or they can keep using opengl, which is still available on Windows and Linux, and simply drop Macintosh... Like what's being discussed here. And except for a tiny minority of developers who have more than a diminutive handful of Apple users to worry about, that's going to make a whole lot more sense. It's hard enough to find opengl developers with more than a little experience, but it's literally impossible to find any with much experience with Metal since it's new.
Microsoft was able to use its dominant market position and its game console to force adoption of d3d. Apple has no such advantage. Get ready to have even less available software, Apple users. You should be used to it by now...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're complaining about insults so that you don't have to discuss the actual issue, which is that only a total moron would think that boning developers in this fashion for no good reason is a good idea. Microsoft was able to push direct3d on an audience which didn't want it first because of their dominant position in the market, and second (and later) because of their game console. Apple has neither of those things, so this is a true idiot move. You can now proceed to cry about Apple management being called idiots, or consider the strength of the argument, but either way, Apple is off its nut and you're engaging in a diversionary tactic to prevent yourself from having to realize it.
The idea that Apple can push their own 3d API is a fever dream. What was good about OSX is that it was standards-based. Now Apple is moving away from that, and there is nothing good or intelligent about it. Rather, it is a delusional decision, and you are being equally delusional — and defensive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
They're not dropping it, simply stopping further internal development. OpenGL is pretty much legacy at this point, the most used implementation is ~10 years old and Khronos has moved on to Vulkan (basically OpenGL 5).
Khronos initially wanted money for Vulkan so Apple went off on their own and developed Metal, now Khronos is releasing their own Vulkan libraries for Mac and iOS (and made MoltenVK royalty-free, although not patent-free).
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Apple doesn't want devs to be able to easily port apps between platforms. They're hoping that devs making mobile apps will spend their efforts just on iDevices.
All it will really do is push Apple further out of the gaming and graphics design markets.
Vulcan is a dead standard. Nobody uses it.
Bullshit. Vulkan is now available on over 40% of Android devices, which by itself makes it the second most widely distributed graphics API in the universe, second only to OpenGL ES, available on 100% of Android devices. Vulkan is supported by numerous PC titles. Most AAA game engines support Vulkan, the others have it on the way. Unity Engine supports Vulkan on Android, Linux and Windows. Likewise Unreal. ID tech 6 was the AAA engine to support Vulkan and is widely licensed. Steam's Source2 engine supports Vulkan. Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan (and OpenGL 4.5). Looks like not dead.
Here is an Android Vulkan demo of Unreal Engine from two years ago. That is 100% real time on a Galaxy S7. You can see why it got traction.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That's all well and good on iDevices, where having a different graphic API for every platform is, and has always been, the norm. On the desktop, we've long been able to support all major platforms with a single graphics stack; Apple is breaking that for Mac OS, and it is not going to end well for them.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Khronos initially wanted money for Vulkan so Apple went off on their own and developed Metal
Not quite. Apple created Metal a couple of years before Vulkan was first released. So Apple first released Metal in 2014 and the Khronos Group first announced Vulkan in 2015. The first release of Vulkan was in 2016.
Who was first does not really matter. Just wanted to note that the motivation for developing Metal was to improve performance / battery life in iOS devices. It was not a vanity project driven by the need to do everything on their own. Well maybe partially, but there were no good alternatives at the time so developing Metal was their only option.
It doesn't matter wether it's better...
Apple are a niche vendor, the more they can do to ease porting of applications to their platform the better... If developers have to port all their code to a completely new graphics api then the effort requires increases significantly. This is going to directly result in less software being ported to apple platforms.
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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.