Apple abandons OpenCL and OpenGL
With the release of MacOS 10.14 Mojave yesterday, Apple quietly confirmed that they have abandoned OpenGL and OpenCL.
In the updated MacOS 10.14 documentation, Apple stated that applications built using OpenGL and OpenCL can continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and applications that now use OpenGL should be turned to Metal. Similarly, applications using OpenCL for computational tasks should also use Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.
Shmuel Csaba Otto Traian [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons
“Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.
Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques. For information about developing apps and games using Metal, see the developer documentation for Metal, Metal Performance Shaders, and MetalKit. For information about migrating OpenGL code to Metal, see Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View.“
There are signs that Apple wants to abandon OpenCL and OpenGL. They have been promoting the use of its Metal API on MacOS and iOS in recent years. Apple’s OpenGL Stack has not been updated over the years and has fallen seriously behind the Khronos Group’s OpenGL 4.x. Although Apple does not currently say when it will remove actual driver support, it should not last long.
OpenCL was originally developed by Apple and has its trademark rights. With regard to the adoption of desktop applications, OpenCL is not always going smoothly. Now with the deprecation of macOS, it should be difficult for us to see OpenCL emerge in more desktop applications in the future.
