Are we stick to GL 2 on Mac?
Why?
Does it outperforms its counter part implementation on Windows that it does not require “instancing” or “hardware tessellation”?
Does this make GL > 2 not fully portable?
The highest version of OpenGL on the Mac is 2.1, so yes, we are kind of stuck. Apparently Apple prefers using super-stable drivers and so didn’t upgrade to GL3. I don’t think there’s a performance reason, as some of my code runs significantly faster on Linux with new drivers on the same machine.
I guess this makes GL > 2 not fully portable, but I can’t imagine Apple stopping support for OpenGL. I would expect an upgrade with 10.7 (but at the same time, I kind of expected it for 10.6 also…), but again, this is just my speculation.
lol sorry but Apple drivers are not even stable… Have you notice the issues of 10.6.3 drivers? It’s quite sucks which is quite a dumb position from Apple. I believe that both nVidia and AMD would just prefer to build the full drivers themselves. The good news is that Intel drivers are still worse!
…
This is one of the reasons I ended up buying a PC shortly after Snow Leopard release.
With the PC, I can use whatever OpenGL version I want. On the Mac, we still don’t known what to expect.
Similar to the Java 6 story, where Apple was also very silent about when the support would come, if ever.
They’re finally packing iMacs with some decent graphics hardware. I just got an iMac with an ATI 5750, which I think is a bit better than a GEFOrce 9800, judging by the specs. I’m going to install Windows and use it for OpenGL 4.0 development. It would be really nice if the OpenGL 4.0 cards the new iMacs shipped with could run the OpenGL 4.0 features on OSX.
I can run Source engine games at max settings at 2550x1440 resolution, so it seems very capable.
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