On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 13:17:43 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
Apple has officially dropped OpenGL support at WWDC, if you care to watch the presentations and early release documentation.
Are you sure they have _dropped_ OpenGL and not just got switched away from using OpenGL as their low level layer for Cocoa?
https://developer.apple.com/opengl/ https://developer.apple.com/opencl/ https://developer.apple.com/metal/
They might change their mind and surprise the world, but that is how things stand.
AFAIK they are on the Vulkan working group, but probably don't view Vulkan as ready for consumption. They needed Metal on iOS because GPUs on iPads/iPhones are weak. That happend before Vulkan came along.
So it makes sense to move Metal to OS-X while waiting for Vulkan to mature on their hardware (or rather waiting for older GPUs to be irrelevant). They have a compatibility interest in keeping developers on Metal until iPhones/iPads are ready for Vulkan.
So who cares if Intel, AMD, and Valve are heavily invested in Vulkan?
Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and Imagination are all in on Vulkan, aren't they?
Everybody cares about what they do because they write the drivers for next gen GPUs. It makes sense to focus Vulkan-effort on next generation of hardware for vendors (profit motive).
It is not at all obvious that Apple will want to keep writing and maintaining their own low level drivers once GPU vendors ship solid Vulkan implementations.
Of course, Apple cannot tell the public that Metal will become irrelevant in a few years... They have a story to sell.
