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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.