Why OpenGL Going Away is Bad

[@Frank007001]

I had the exact same reaction as you when I saw that. A lot of people keep telling me they’re not worried because it’s going to take years before they finally pull the plug. I just hate the feeling to not know when my software is simply going to break because they want to push their agenda. Let’s be real, every opengl call is currently being mapped to their metal api, they just want to intentionally drop support. Also, you missed the web, although not my favorite platform, webgl was the only way to do 3D graphics, there is currently no other alternative there. I’m just as pissed as you and I know apple will not go in a crossplatform direction anymore just because they can. It’s so much anti-developper because we have to either drop support or rewrite everything for them(which is extremely hard for indie and small teams). Anyhow, I’m betting on MoltenGL for now, but I still really don’t like how apple is acting...

[@NeilRoy]

Time for Apple people to switch to PCs because I for one will not program something that is platform specific. Apple is slicing their own throat. Adios Apple. I'm still against immediate mode being removed as it is just fine for quite a lot. Not all 3D apps need shaders and crap. I like choice. I dislike someone else's ideas being forced on me. That Vulkan example is absolutely, batshit insane! I would rather do immediate mode! Anyhow, I'm not "forced" into using ANYTHING. I simply will not code for anything other than OpenGL, period.

[@anilmawji]

14:12 When I saw the size of that scroll bar my jaw dropped. Holy crap.

[@sean8102]

Same thing with D3D 12. Both API's give the developer MUCH more control. Which can go very well (like Doom/Doom Eternal) or poorly like the DX 12 implementation in FF7 remake for PC.

[@jagbot]

exactly! i looked at the scroll bar thumb too and was like no way!

[@nick15684]

Just another feather to add to the "reasons not to develop for Apple products" cap. Why couldn't they support Vulkan? Simply because they wanted to be different than everyone else. Microsoft has DirectX for Xbox primarily, so it makes sense that they have their own proprietary API since they develop their own consoles. Apple does not and never has, so it makes zero sense why they felt the need to create their own API. Not to mention, on Windows, you can still use OpenGL and Vulkan if you don't feel like using DirectX. Not so with Apple, now you're pretty much forced to use Metal, something that does not apply to any other platform. And people still wonder why most games never get ported to Mac, even though it's been getting more and more powerful, it's because developing for it is way too much of a headache.

[@Bestmann3n]

using opengl with DSA and AZDO techniques is quite pleasant and can be very fast. Even more so if you have access to gl_drawid through 4.6 or the extension. Personally I think it's a shame they made vulkan instead of making glnext be basically just a small and streamlined api based on the DSA/AZDO-stuff. Also I don't necessarily think Vulkan is much more low level than "modern" opengl. Yes it's more complicated and more difficult to use but it seems to me that Vulkan offers low level access to internal driver abstractions rather than low level access to the actual hardware. A real low level graphics api would give us a standardized ISA and direct access to memory, and that's what vulkan imo should have been. anyway agree with you on all points. nice video :)

[@skrolikowski]

Great detailed explanation. I just started learning OpenGL before the announcement and was bummed to hear what Apple was doing. The MacOS game market may be small but for iOS it’s huge! Interesting to see what’ll happen to the App Store in the near future.

[@jesusredondo513]

I am exactly in the same position, I literally rendred a triangle in my Mac using OpenGL 3.3+ and the next day Apple is saying OpenGL is going to get deprecated... I am still going for the route of learning OpenGL, obviously, but this is so discouraging.

[@lifelonglearner4254]

Who cares about Apple?

[@biehdc]

yea just drop apple stuff, not worth maintaining

[@ccgamerlol]

anyone that doesnt like apple

[@NymezWoW]

Everyone with a cross platform product that is going to lose a % of target audience if apple pulls the plug.

[@sean8102]

@@NymezWoW For pro apps sure, gaming on the Mac though ? Is that even a thing. Last I looked Mac OS made up less than 2 percent of steam users

[@dogwoof5391]

@@sean8102 we exist! life is pain every day ^.^

[@bluesillybeard]

For a school project, we (5 of us) are making a mobile app. Supporting IOS has been an absolute freaking load of annoying crap and I'm genuinely impressed that IOS has any app support lol

[@dmaster20ify]

I have been lingering to get into some serious graphics programming; but my other programming projects already take so much time. Such as a little language I developed called Auto Replace. I completed the ascii version, but then thought; why limit myself to English Language? Also a IDE I am working on.

[@richardbloemenkamp8532]

I'm so happy that Apple is leaving us and moved its focus completely to I-store games where they take 30% of every purchase and which they turn into a dumb passive game console. The hobbyists will all come back to PC either under Linux or Windows. Even my 11-year old child is happier with and doing more creative things with a Windows PC than with our I-Pad-Pro and Nintendo that both haven't been touched in 2 months.

[@bobthedino2007]

Minor correction: Apple announced Metal in 2014, which is before Vulkan was announced in 2016. Edit: my point is that you made it seem like Apple chose not to adopt Vulkan and announced Metal instead, whereas in fact Metal came first. From Apple's point of view they want to have direct control over their own graphics API without having to get everything done via committee (much as Microsoft controls Direct3D) - you could see that this is somewhat reasonable and has advantages for Apple. The unfortunate difference with the Mac is that NVIDIA/AMD are unable to provide their own implementations of OpenGL on macOS, as they can on Windows - although this may change in the future if Apple relaxes things, but sadly it seems highly unlikely.

[@VertoStudio3D]

Apple was part of the standards committee for GLNext (which became vulkan), before vulkan was even named. Vulkan pulled out of standards comittee essentially sandbagging Vulkan intentionally before it even was announced. It doesn't matter the order of metal vs vulkan. Their intentions were clear early on.

[@bobthedino2007]

Good point, fair enough. In lieu of OpenGL what seems to be needed is some new cross-platform graphics API that is as easy to use as OpenGL (compared to Vulkan) and doesn't rely on manufacturer support. I keep seeing "bgfx" being mentioned as something that does this, but I don't know much about it.

[@remasteredretropcgames3312]

@@VertoStudio3D Its pretty crazy what happens when you shove 47GBs of texture data into OpenGL to where each level compile is hovering very close to the 4GB address wall in id tech 4. Specifically Prey 2006. And at this level with extra draw calls thanks to Mcflys path tracer, you start to get a glimpse of where the efficiency of the engine is being pushed to the limit. DSA OpenGL would be a nice touch but unfortunately time is money, and no one cares.

[@coleshores]

I wouldn't sweat it too much. Someone will certainly create a wrapper that sits on top of Metal that implements the entire OpenGL spec.

[@commandershepard1944]

People who own a Mac don't deserve nice things.

[@mdjey2]

Why not?

[@jamespong6588]

Do you have a link for a tutorial on how to draw an image with open gl 1.1??

[@keyvanmehrbakhsh4069]

I think opengl 1.1 is enough for everything I like in 3d graphics :D

[@Intars5d]

If i correctly understood - is it so that OpenGL 1.1 would be still, even with its obsolescence, kind of better suited for introductory first step educational purposes? And if so - how does one do it nowadays on modern computer with WIn10 on it for example ? Do i emulate this thing? It seems there is not much such options, google returns one company, something like Mali OpenGL ES on which there is old manual docs for 1.1 emulator but it can't be found on company's site anymore. They offer OpenGL ver3 and ver2 specification emulation with their publicly available tool as it seems now. I intend in upcoming close future to explore some OpenGL for possible intentions of its application in robotics. I got it that 1.1 is really, really old but your statement that it gives wider compability and prolonging life of its code caught my attention. Lets say one is OK with some crude, primitive and not fastest basic graphics for some embedded robotics system - is 1.1 really that bad for this , if your intention is for CG-related code to make it as cross-platform and prolonged-in-its-life?

[@VertoStudio3D]

1.1 is still hardware accelerated and continues to be supported (and likely will be for a long time) on windows via Nvidia and AMD drivers. I think it’s a great place to learn, and to start. If you want to advance beyond it however, you should move on to GL 2.0 within a few months. After that it starts to get pretty advanced and technical (3.0 plus).

[@seditt5146]

OpenGL 1.1 is directly supported via Windows GDI so there is little to no reason to call it directly as WinGDI is 10 thousand times more user friendly. If you want GL 1.1 on windows just use that.

[@DudeMannn]

Apple takes it away. So that it could bring it back as a new 3D iPad to make more money off of us ?????

[@floatingpointerror55]

What was that book you starded out with opengl?

[@VertoStudio3D]

It’s called “the OpenGL programming guide”. Most ppl just call it “the red book”. The one I read was back when 1.5 was the latest version.

[@floatingpointerror55]

@@VertoStudio3D oh ok thanks bro

[@jaymesc4436]

What about webgl ? Apple doesn't seem to want to kill it

[@sean8102]

It's being replaced slowly by webGPU which is much lower level API, like Vulkan and DX 12. It's still in a working draft state as of Jan 2022.

[@sean8102]

I'm not a programmer or anything but find this kind of stuff interesting. I'm curious, dose MoltenVK help with this problem now that it's had more time to develop and mature? I'm know you're aware of what it is but for those that aren't from my understanding it's either a wrapper or library that translates Vulkan API calls to Metal API calls on the fly for both macOS and iOS. Link here moltengl.com/moltenvk/ I know the game "Elder Scrolls Online" which uses it's own in house engine (Zenimax is obviously "AAA" though) switched to using Vulkan for their macOS client of the game by using MoltenVK after Apple announced the EOL details regarding OGL on macOS and iOS (guessing they plan to switch the Windows client over to Vulkan from D3D 11 at some point as well).

[@Mycon]

this is how Flash died

[@ICRainbow]

Good riddance.

[@HobokerDev]

Apple is cutting the branch they are sitting on... again. But they can afford it. Fanboys will defend every shit decision. The way I see it - Abandon apple. If users have a problem with that maybe it's time to get a grip. If they keep doing this shit, and people keep giving in, they'll never stop.

[@SourceCodeDeleted]

Hey your site appears to be in a bad state. I was trying to see what your company does and couldn't.

[@VertoStudio3D]

I've blocked several countries due to incessant attacks against my site. sorry but I don't have much time to deal with spambots so thats what I did. Personally email me your ip address and I'll allow it this week.

[@SourceCodeDeleted]

I'll see what I can give this week . Thank you.

[@seditt5146]

Up until the DSA and AZDO updates OpenGL got slower and slower with every damn update. Every new feature they added slowed down the system regardless of what we were told. The old school Command List were amazingly fast on the hardware of the day, then they moved to VBO slowing things down, then they moved to from pointers to Attribute buffers again slowing down, then they pushed UBOs which are again slower than just directly calling your uniforms( unless you have a ton of shared uniforms). Point is, OpenGL gets more complicated while becoming less efficient. It is like people did not run proper benchmarks and just took them at their word on this. They created Azdo type stuff and realized it was time to die and make something less complicated, yes I said that Vulkan gives you the power to setup the state ahead of time instead of jerry rigging everything around to make it work in a lesser fashion. It's time for it to die everyone, I for one can't wait.

[@PaulSpades]

Well, this crap situation is your own fault. Experts focusing all of their efforts into developing tools for them only (Vulkan and dx12) made this happen. Where's the middle and high level 3d API? Where's the API abstraction layer? Glide and openGL were simple, like you said. I learned old school OpenGL with a small programming language called Basic4GL. There's now no layer above except webGL. So, congrats! Most devs now need a browser (or a full blown game engine) to use any sort of a sane application-level API for graphics. How does this help the performance of most applications, versus OpenGL with forward rendering? Pushing for lower level APIs as the standard is misguided, too. The GPU hardware space is already patent laden and the new graphics APIs cement the duopoly. Where's the driver abstraction layer? Gone! Nobody new can get in, no hardware or software innovations or any kind of improvements can now happen. The gpu hardware used to do it's thing, the driver targeted the standard APIs. Hardware designers are now stuck with the 20 shaders and functional units defined in the low level standard, or they change the standard. Graphics programmers are stuck with a standard that changes every new hardware generation. It's the worst of both worlds. Congrats again!

[@VertoStudio3D]

No

[@JohnWickMovie]

Разница в производительности D3D11 vs D3D12 не такая уж и серьезная

[@jarisipilainen3875]

19:35 so what unity and unreal use if they not opengl or directx... they are something else. so stop opengl and make your own something else.. you can create your own openglmetal library that make cube in 1 line

[@UltimaN3rd]

Unity and Unreal use OpenGL/Direct3D under the hood.

[@sean8102]

Unity and Unreal added Metal API support long ago. Along with DX12 and Vulkan.

[@Flamenc0]

Reasons not to use apple products ep. 49843279324872319132 lmao