No More SL for Mac Users?

[Julia Blackwood]

Let me say upfront that I'm an artist, not a techie so this is all Greek to me.

I've been told the following:

"OSX the latest OpenGL version is 4.0. Apple announced no more further development for OpenGL and they will not support future versions such as Vulkan either. So as games progress further for Windows and Linux, OSX users will feel the sting of that. No more SL for OSX users .. but Linux is free. And should work on any PC machine."

Can anyone explain this for me and tell me if this is accurate?

[Baloo Uriza]

If it is true (re Apple and OpenGL 4), then I'd say Apple's trying to kill off the Macintosh.

[Callum Meriman]

There was a rash of rumours middle of 2015 about El Capitan not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan, but El Capitan came out some 9 months ago with Open GL, and the roadmap into the future shows openGL there too.

 

Old rumours are still rumours - not worth the toilet paper they are wiped on.

 

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Gretchen Janick wrote:

OSX the latest OpenGL version is 4.0.

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https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823 says the latest version is currently 4.1, so yeah. I'd take that person's word with a lump of salt, it was likely false information during the rumour cycle a year ago.

[Julia Blackwood]

Thank you! Very much appreciate your help.

[Gavin Hird]

Most of the current Apple hardware supports OpenGL 4.1 or 3.3 for systems that are a bit older. 

The Mac version of the viewer use OpenGl 2.1 so that is a bit outdated, and LL could have updated their code a long time ago. 

Apple is currenlty shifting their graphics capabilites over from OpenGL to Metal as that gives a performance increase in the order of  2.5 - 10 times depending on what the code does. The viewer renderer can be rewritten for Metal, although there obviously is quite a bit of work to do so.

 

 

[Baloo Uriza]

Sounds like it's apple users' loss on this, much like the poor Windows support, and for the same reasons.

You can have good OpenGL support and work cross platform, or you can pick a platform and multiply dev costs and lock out potential users.  Same thing happens with DirectX between the Microsoft world and everyone else.

[Gavin Hird]

Apple is not particularly preoccupied with cross platform support, but to wring as much performance and battery life as possible out of their iOS devices, of which there are hundreds of millions of users. 

If LL wants to play in the mobile space, iOS is where most money is made. An investment in rewriting the code would improve their bottom line, and pave they way for a viewer on iOS.