OpenGL deprecated in OS-X

[John-Val Rose]

Unfortunately Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did during the “Great API Wars”. During this time, MS decided to go with its own exclusive graphics API namely Direct 3D as part of their whole DirectX technology instead of the obvious approach of supporting OpenGL fully.

These days, GPU drivers for DirectX work much better on Windows than those for OpenGL.

The same will now apply for Metal drivers versus OpenGL drivers on MacOS.

This is all about “vendor lock-in” and can be seen with other technologies like WebKit and Blink for example.

Of course this is bad news for the developers but devs are not the core market for Windows, Apple or Google/Android hardware.

The bright light on the horizon is Vulkan from Khronos which started out life as OpenGL 5 but is now being pushed as the ultimate cross platform graphics API.

Even Microsoft have jumped on board and Vulkan driver support on Windows is good.

We will have to wait and see but having a situation where OpenGL, DirectX, Metal and Vulkan are all important graphics APIs simultaneously is clearly not tenable.

> On 5 Jun 2018, at 06:51, Tom Schindl <tom.schindl at bestsolution.at> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I don‘t know what the Apple guys are smoking but they just deprecated OpenGL. The question is what does this mean for JavaFX.
> 
> See https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/
> 
> Tom
> 
> Von meinem iPhone gesendet