Apple Opengl Programming Guide For Mac

Apple Opengl Programming Guide For Mac 8,8/10 7390 votes

A new macOS is upon us and Mojave is packed with new features sure to delight consumers and aficionados alike. The WWDC 2018 keynote showed the grounds being made in AR and using the Metal graphics framework for its development. This push has also prompted Apple to deprecate both the OpenGL and OpenGL frameworks.

Why deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL

Apple wants to ensure that in the future, all applications that use the OpenGL standard (and the iOS equivalent OpenGL ES) switch to Apple's own Metal API. Similarly, it also wants the swift to be made for all computation tasks that use OpenCL, also switching to the Metal framework. Typically, using an open standard like OpenGL and OpenCL allows for developers to more easily make cross-platform applications. Creating the same application over multiple OSs using different APIs is time consuming and costly. So it's easy to see why a developer would do so. Apple's stance on deprecating software is the following:

Apple opengl programming guide for mac pro

Earlier this month, Apple's developer documentation advised that active development has ceased for OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac, and that the APIs will only get 'minor changes' going forward. Jun 04, 2018 The Apple-specific OpenGL APIs also provide the option for sharing data between contexts, as shown in Figure 14-2. Shared resources are automatically set up as mutual exclusion (mutex) objects. Notice that thread 2 draws to a pixel buffer that is linked to the shared state as a texture. Thread 1 can then draw using that texture.

Periodically, Apple adds deprecation macros to APIs to indicate that those APIs should no longer be used in active development. When a deprecation occurs, it's not an immediate end of life for the specified API. Instead, it is the beginning of a grace period for transitioning from that API and to newer and more modern replacements. Deprecated APIs typically remain present and usable in the system for a reasonable time past the release in which they were deprecated. However, active development on them ceases, and the APIs receive only minor changes to accommodate security patches or to fix other critical bugs. Deprecated APIs may be removed entirely from a future version of the operating system.As a developer, avoid using deprecated APIs in your code as soon as possible. At a minimum, new code you write should never use deprecated APIs. And if your existing code uses deprecated APIs, update that code as soon as possible.

The inherent benefits of Metal

Apple also goes on to explain why it's better to switch to Metal over the open standards:

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.

How this affects the end user

Ultimately, this will not affect consumers overall. Developers interested in maintaining a program will simple make the switch internally in their application transparently to the consumer. Developers that use major graphics engines such as Unity and Unreal have Metal support built in already so the transition is already done. There is also a push for the multi-platform Vulkan graphics API (under the MoltenVK API since Apple nixed direct Vulcan access on macOS) by some developers more keen on being able to still develop with multi-platform APIs.

What's your take?

Are you a developer? Are you using OpenGL and OpenCL in your applications? Will the switch to Metal and deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL be seen as something you welcome or is it enough to push you to another platform? Some say that this also means the death knell of webGL as well. What's your take? Let us know in the comments!

macOS Catalina

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Important:OpenCL was deprecated in macOS 10.14. To create high-performance code on GPUs, use the Metal framework instead. See Metal.

Important OpenCL was deprecated in macOS 10.14. To create high-performance code on GPUs, use the Metal framework instead. See Metal.

OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) is an open standard for cross-platform, programming of modern highly-parallel processor architectures. Introduced with OS X v10.6, OpenCL consists of a C99-based programming language designed for parallelism, a powerful scheduling API, and a flexible runtime that executes kernels on the CPU or GPU. OpenCL lets your application harness the computing power of these processors to improve performance and deliver new features based on compute-intensive algorithms.

In addition to support for the OpenCL 1.1 standard, OS X v10.7 adds integration between OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), and Xcode to make it even easier to use OpenCL in your application.

At a Glance

Using OpenCL is easier than ever as of OS X v10.7:

OpenCL is fully supported by Xcode. The Xcode offline compiler removes a configuration step that used to have to be performed before the kernel could be run and facilitates debugging earlier in the development process. See Hello World!.
You can write OpenCL functions in separate files and include them in your Xcode project. You can compile the kernels when your application is built, before it runs. This improves runtime performance.
OpenCL now integrates with GCD, making it easier for you to focus on making your OpenCL kernels more efficient. See Using Grand Central Dispatch With OpenCL.
The autovectorizer compiles and accelerates performance of kernels that run on the CPU up to four times without additional effort. The autovectorizer allows you to write one kernel that runs efficiently on both a CPU and a GPU. You can invoke the autovectorizer regardless of whether you are compiling from Xcode or building the kernels at runtime. Or you can disable the autovectorizer if necessary. See Autovectorizer.

You can, of course, continue to use code you’ve already written to the OpenCL 1.1 standard. But see Binary Compatibility Of OpenCL Kernels for a note about how to handle existing binaries.

Because OpenCL C is based on C99, you are free to process your data in OpenCL C functions as you would in C with few limitations. Aside from support for recursion and function pointers, there are not many language features that C has that OpenCL C doesn’t have. In fact, OpenCL C provides several beneficial features that the C programming language does not offer natively, such as optimized image access functions. OpenCL C has built-in support for vector intrinsics and offers vector data types. The operators in OpenCL C are overloaded, and performing arithmetic between vector data types is syntactically equivalent to performing arithmetic between scalar values. Refer to the The OpenCL Specification for more details on the built-in functions and facilities of the OpenCL C language.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you program in C and have access to The OpenCL Specification. Although this guide discusses many key OpenCL API functions, it does not provide detailed information on the OpenCL API or the OpenCL C programming language.