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Apple officially asks GPU developers to stop caring about Mac OS X and iOS
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-opengl-across-all-oses
A while ago, it was peculiar when Apple declined to support Vulkan. Now they're deprecating support for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL, and both on Mac OS X and iOS. Instead, they want developers to use Metal.
That's pretty much the end of cross-platform support for anything GPU-related. Now you get a choice of supporting Apple OSes or supporting everything else. If anyone out there finds that a non-trivial decision, I'd like to recommend going with "everything else".
A while ago, it was peculiar when Apple declined to support Vulkan. Now they're deprecating support for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL, and both on Mac OS X and iOS. Instead, they want developers to use Metal.
That's pretty much the end of cross-platform support for anything GPU-related. Now you get a choice of supporting Apple OSes or supporting everything else. If anyone out there finds that a non-trivial decision, I'd like to recommend going with "everything else".
Comments
Do you think this announcement will lead to less games on Mac OS?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
This would also cripple game developers who use the game engines, as if they want to add support for something not built into the engine directly, then now they have their own case of the two independent code paths problem.
That's not to say that it can't be done. In principle, it doesn't have to be any worse than making the "same" game available on PS4, Xbox One, Windows, and Android. But those all have large market share in games (though for Android, in a different sense than the others), which can provide a payoff that porting to Apple doesn't. Still, how many games are available both on Android and PS4? And even if a game is available on Windows, PS4, and Xbox One, we don't always think of it as being the "same" game, as the differences will tend to be much larger than if the same game is available on both Windows and Linux.
Still, if you're a game engine developer trying for cross-platform support, how hard do you really want to work to get something working on a Mac when Apple is officially trying to kill your cross-platform support? Get something working today and they might go out of their way to break it tomorrow.
As for less games on Mac OS, it could plausibly herald nearly the end of gaming on Mac OS. Mac OS already isn't much of a gaming platform, but this is a huge blow. I don't just mean not many new games coming. It's very possible that Apple removes support in the future so that most games that run fine today completely stop working in the future. It wouldn't make sense to deprecate the widely used APIs if you're going to keep supporting them for another decade.
Try gaming on a Mac either native or in Bootcamp? Deeply unsatisfying. Apple's decision to wall in their infrastructure? Good luck with that but in their defense, they aren't appealing to most of us. They sold over 52 MM iPhones in Q2 this year, 9.1 MM iPads, and 4 MM Macs. Clear where their focus is. With all of that said, they grew revenues 20% worldwide; more in Europe than the US so you have to give them props.
By the way, my iMac is currently sitting in the closet and I bought my last iPhone a few years ago. Rocking a LG Moto X now for a phone; I love it. $225 retail and I got a 2nd one for free on my Project Fi account. I'll not pay nearly a grand for a phone....
Seaspite
Playing ESO on my X-Box
It's only been for a few corner cases, such as CUDA, that GPU vendor-provided drivers were even needed.
This has nothing to do with cross-platform GPU selection. Apple can still chose to use whatever they want, and they will continue to provide their own drivers. Just as they always have.
It makes a big difference to software developers though. A lot of gaming titles on OS X used OpenGL. I wonder if a DirectX (or OpenGL) to Metal conversion layer exists somewhere.... my guess is that it probably already does - maybe not runtime conversion, but at least at the API/Source Code level.
And it's not like Metal doesn't have some level of adoption - pretty much every iOS game uses it, and as much as a PC-oriented site like this one may reject the notion, the iOS gaming market is pretty freakin' big. Apple App Store annual gaming revenue is about the same as all the large gaming publishers (EA, Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, etc) - added together.
So Apple said fuck it and went back to their old ways. Closed ecosystem it will be. We'll created our own graphics API that only works on our systems. Windows can keep their DirectX and have all the desktop games... but we, we will dominate the mobile market because everyone will be running iOS. iOS on their watches, iOS on their tablets, iOS on their phones. And what a lucrative market it will be.
The money is no longer in desktops. It's in mobile. And mobile is where Apple has put 100% of their focus.
In the UK, people only ever buy Mac for work. You wouldn't buy it as a gaming (or even semi-gaming) computer. If gaming is anywhere on your list of priorities, you'd opt for something else. Is this true for the US market as well?
As of 2017, Statista reports that devs favor developing for mobile only over AR devices (lol), Xbone (Lol), and Mac (LOL).
That's because, despite all the advancements, mobile devices still can't hold a candle to the experience you can create or enjoy on other dedicated devices, specifically one as powerful as a PC.
The lack of tactile response prevalent in most smartphones these days is hamstringing the mobile video game industry. Devs don't wanna develop for a platform that's exponentially more of a headache to design for than PCs or gaming consoles are. There's a reason touchpad keyboards aren't all the rage in PC accessories. Tactile response is hugely important for things like twitch gaming, which drives the industry in general (shooters being over 25% of industry share in 2017 per ESA report).
So Apple, at least in this industry, is pretty much accepting they won't get traction competing with PCs or consoles. They're absolutely doubling down on the mobile revenue.
They seem to be content with only having a major video game presence in terms of fielding a major smartphone presence.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a good idea (for consumers). I just think Apple is content to only share in that slice of the gaming pie in any major way.
There was a point in time where Apple pursued gaming semi-seriously. They actually created a console once upon a time (Bandai Pippin). Steve Jobs famously introduced the world to Halo, not Microsoft.
But those were all a long time ago. Apple still does court gaming developers on iOS, but iOS hasn't ever supported the full OpenGL spec (only the ES version, which probably stands for Extra Stupid), and has had Metal for a good while now (iOS 8 in 2014). A year later, Metal was migrated to OS X. Apple buys engineers and hardware to create their own mobile silicon. They take whatever they can find for cheap/energy efficient for their OS X lines, and haven't updated a lot of their computer lines for several years. That pretty much shows the "gaming" priorities of Apple.
Metal was intended to be a Vulkan/DX12 competitor.
So I don't know of anyone who ever bought a Macintosh for gaming purposes.. unless that game is Marathon or Oregon Trail.
News of OpenGL retiring has much more impact on Adobe/Autodesk/Quark, and to some extent . It has no impact on nVidia/AMD. It only has an extremely low impact on gaming: Steam Hardware survey shows OS X has 3% share, which does beat out Linux, but it's still so low as to be pretty insignificant. That, and the fact that anyone who still wants Apple hardware and wants to game semi-seriously has had the option of Bootcamp for a long while now. While OpenGL has an impact on Gaming, OS X does not, and this news just isn't really going to affect gaming at all.
I haven't looked at the Metal API, but I have looked at Vulkan. When they say Vulkan gives you lower level access to stuff, they mean it. It's intended for the hard-core developers who are serious about extracting every last ounce of performance out of hardware, and not really appropriate for most developers making a game on a budget of a few million dollars. If Metal tries to do that, too, without having some higher level version of it to cover up a bunch of stuff and make it not really a competitor to Vulkan, then it's hard to imagine it being used all that broadly.
Apple doesn't care about desktop gaming. Why should they? They don't have a respectable market share before this, so who cares. But as you said, this has a much bigger impact on content creators.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
I guess it's never been a huge market for them in the first place, just a prominent one. And it's hard to argue with their marketing strategy - they are pretty much dominating
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/tablet/worldwide
However, the tablet market seems to have peaked in 2014 and has been shrinking ever since then.
Meanwhile, iOS is a very distant second place to Android in smartphones, and it's been a long time since they even had 20% of that market by number of phones sold:
https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os
Cheap smartphones are almost exclusively Android, with Apple having a much higher percentage of the expensive phones, however. One also suspects that people who buy a $500 phone tend to spend more in an app store than people who buy a $200 phone.
So while Apple is still making a ton of money, it's far from guaranteed that that will continue to be the case. They're nowhere near as dominant in any major market as Windows has been in desktops and laptops for the last 25 years.
It's not hard to see how Apple's market position could collapse. People who are used to Android on a $200 phone and later have more money and buy a $500 phone are more likely to stick with Android than jump to iOS. People who are used to Android on a phone and later buy a tablet might again want to stick with Android rather than jump to iOS. It's much harder to see the reverse happening, as Apple simply doesn't offer any budget-friendly devices of any sort.
I'm not predicting the imminent demise of Apple. They might well maintain or expand their market share in their key markets for years to come, or come to dominate a new market that is tiny or non-existent today. But I do think that if they make it so that developers basically have to choose to either develop for Apple OSes only or for everything else, most are going to go with "everything else".