Mountain Lion update?

So, does anyone have any news whether Moutain Lion will feature OpenGL 4.1 or 4.2? Anyone on WWDC? What is Apple doing in the Khronos Group if they don’t use the technologies they approve themselves? :slight_smile:

Apart from the keynote, everything from the WWDC is probably under NDA. But if 10.8 would support anything beyond 3.2 this information would be all over the net. 10.8 will come out soon and there have been betas for some time now. If we are lucky, we will get 4.0 in a year or two with 10.9… :frowning:

They’re still providing better support than Intel. I would actually trust Apple’s 3.2 GL implementation over any Intel implementation, regardless of version.

What is Apple doing in the Khronos Group if they don’t use the technologies they approve themselves?

They do. MacOSX uses OpenGL. Just not the most recent version of it.

Thank you both for the answer. I’m not really into the driver <-> OpenGL API inner workings so maybe my question is totally stupid. But since OpenGL is open-source and (apparently) the GPU drivers included on MacOS are provided by the GPU makers themselves, is it possible that an application would ship with its own OpenGL driver (say 4.2) and don’t use the MacOS included ones? Would it work?

I don’t know the reason why Apple won’t support a rather (technologically) old API such as OpenGL 4.2 on their system. But most of the games that run on both OS X and Windows 7 do seem to have the exact same visual quality (and they are pretty good!), although the performance on OS X is usually worse.

No, it’s not. It’s a open, royalty-free standard, but not open-source.

No, they’re not, at least not anything above a low-level, close-to-the-metal interface. Apple develops its OpenGL drivers themselves, both for AMD and NVIDIA, even for Intel.

Again, OpenGL is not open-source, neither do application developers write their own OpenGL driver.

OpenGL 4.2 is technologically old API? Are you kidding me? OpenGL 4.2 was released in 2011 and it’s targeting hardware like the Radeon HD5000+ and GeForce 400+. It is actually roughly equivalent with D3D11.1. How old does that sound to you?

That’s because those games are still stuck at D3D9 and OpenGL 2.1 level graphics.

[QUOTE=AndreGB;1238800]Thank you both for the answer. I’m not really into the driver <-> OpenGL API inner workings so maybe my question is totally stupid. But since OpenGL is open-source and (apparently) the GPU drivers included on MacOS are provided by the GPU makers themselves, is it possible that an application would ship with its own OpenGL driver (say 4.2) and don’t use the MacOS included ones? Would it work?

I don’t know the reason why Apple won’t support a rather (technologically) old API such as OpenGL 4.2 on their system. But most of the games that run on both OS X and Windows 7 do seem to have the exact same visual quality (and they are pretty good!), although the performance on OS X is usually worse.[/QUOTE]

Seriously, man, this was the most invalid information anybody put into two paragraphs here at the OpenGL forums… (and being confident about it)

Feature-wise Intel is actually better now as they released OpenGL 4.0 capable drivers for the HD 4000 (see a test here: Intel Ivy Bridge HD Graphics 4000 GPU: OpenGL 4 Tessellation Tested | Geeks3D). Quality-wise - I don’t know. I have not worked with Intel on Windows or Linux (do they even provide closed source drivers for Linux?), I only have some bad Mac experiances (filed as bug reports, some open for quite some time…).

Sorry, I didn’t mean old as in “outdated”. My bad, really. I meant that it wasn’t released “last week”, so Apple didn’t have time to implement it on their Mountain Lion OS. If you consider version 4.1 release date then, that is more than enough time to update your software to support it. My bad, again.

Of course, they should have already enough time to support it. But, as I said, they write their own drivers for all the GPUs they have in Macs so it is independent from the drivers made by Intel, AMD, NVIDIA for Windows and Linux. That’s why they don’t support the same version as the vendors do on other platforms.

Have to mention, though, that at least they went to the correct direction by supporting only core profile for their GL 3.2 drivers. That might have taken a lot of time for them as they probably started from scratch.

Well, but maybe they shouldn’t have. Lots of 3D applications have performance problems on MacOS but not on Windows running on Bootcamp. Although, the OpenGL driver may not be the only culprit.

Is it safe to say, feature wise, that OpenGL 3.x matches DX10 and OpenGL 4.x, DX11?

Plus, this intrigues me:

“Hundreds of new APIs give developers access to new core technologies and enhanced features within OS X. (…) A new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit, first introduced in iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps.”
source: Newsroom - Apple

What do they mean? GLKit is based on OpenGL ES.

[QUOTE=AndreGB;1238836]
What do they mean? GLKit is based on OpenGL ES.[/QUOTE]

GLKit is meant to make it easier for ES 1.1 developers to switch to ES 2.0 by providing trivial “effects” so you don’t need to implement trivial shaders that do little more than mimicing the fixed-function pipeline yourself. It also gives you some math functionality for dealing with matrices etc. If you use C++, GLM might be a better alternative for the later part (as it nicely mimics GLSL and is cross-plattform) while you might not want to use the other helpers in case you plan to build more complex shaders and effects anyway.

This topic was automatically closed 183 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.