Fair enough. Autodesk never ported 3DSMax to Mac. Why not?
Fair enough. Autodesk never ported 3DSMax to Mac. Why not?
Because from it’s earliest day it was designed for Windows 95 multimedia framework and over time has embraced the windows platform. From it’s GUI interfaces (before QT) to APIs inside the maxscript language it breathes windows. I came to love it because of these distinct directions, it was designed for windows - just like some OSX users love some of their software because it was designed for the platform.
Ton Roosendaal announced on Twitter: “Blender 2.8 will use OpenSubdiv (Pixar compatible subdivision surfaces) for modifier stack and rendering within one or two weeks. Viewport (GPU) support is coming too.”
I hope that means OpenSubdiv will finally come to Blender for MacOS, and I hope Apple’s poor OpenGL support won’t ruin that anymore.
This is where you look wrong on things. Blender does not support Linux but OpenGL that is multiplatform, that is beauty of it. Got it?
Almost every CG house runs Linux, mostly Radhat and/or CentOS. They kept few Win and OSX machines just cause of Photoshop.
Blender using OpenGL doesn’t magically make it Linux compatible. There is plenty of other code that makes it different from the Windows and Mac versions that has to be maintained.
OpenGL is multi-platform but it is too old and keeping compatibility is stopping it from being useful. Maybe Vulkan will fill the gap as a replacement, but there will be a future without OpenGL.
Of course, nobody said that, we are talking about OpenGL here. Not sure what was your point in that?
EVEE is OpenGL, does that look old to you? OpenGL is older, but does not mean it is bad. DirectX is probably much better than OpneGLbut we still never got DX Blender version. The same will happen for Metal. Also latest tests shows that OpenCL is even faster than Metal in computing… Metal is made for games not for apps like BLender, MODO, Hoduini etc.
Metal is still really young. Metal was not made just for games, it’s what it’s used for now, but Apple’s goal is to merge graphics and computing on their platform without being beholden to a standards body. They are already using Metal in some of their other non-game related software like Logic. Is not extensively used but I’d imagine that will change in the future.
Yes, but it is bad. I’m talking about the API that is “a grab bag of broken inconsistent functionality”. Support for multi-threading, and asynchronous compute capabilities have all changed a great deal over the past decade. OpenGL was defined in an era where we didn’t have multi-core CPUs.
Blender, Mojo etc. use the same technologies that games use to render graphics. Vertex and fragment shaders.
But still it works better in some cases than any other existing tech. You have post from Houdini developer explaining it nicely. But put that aside, decision factor is not how OpenGL is bad or good. You have DirectX which is years ahead Metal, and in some cases way ahead OpenGL, plus Windows userbase is far more larger than OSX. And still we do not have Blender DX version. Why would you expect it will be different for Metal? It is not about how bad OpenGL is, but Metal being tight to only one platform. I do understand what are you saying, Metal is modern and probably future OSX, but I doubt that we will ever see Blender on Metal, unless Apple chip some $ specifically for it. When I said games I meant that Apple did this not to make 3d apps better on OSX but to make games perform better on OSX. Developing and maintaing game and 3d app are two different worlds.
If you read my post more carefully, I’m not comparing Metal vs OpenGL. I’m saying that OpenGL will need a multi-platform replacement:
Just to lift a bit of confusion. MacOS is right now the most important software for Apple. People fail to realize this because they think iOS is a separate OS.
It’s not.
iOS is MacOS’s mobile part. There are some obvious difference but as it usually happens with code , that is the tip of the iceberg the vast majority is MacOS code. Ironically this fact was emphasized by Steve Jobs when he introduced the first iPhone and he gave a very logical reason, that would make very little sense for the company to replace an OS that was the second most popular and is still the second most popular. Only difference was that back then it had the 3.5% of the market now it has 8% of the market on desktop OSes. A fact that would have surprised even Steve if was still around cause he predicted that even with the massive success of iPhone MacOS could not hope to have more than 5% of the pie. If we include laptops MacOS market share raises to 13%.
MacOS is based on the open source project FreeBSD and its core is also open source called “Darwin” including its kernel which is the heart of any OS, called “XNU”
https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-1013.html
https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-4570.41.2/
And in the source code of course is visible the source code for iOS as well. On the other hand not the entire OS is open source, like Android is.
This also verified by wikipedia
Towards the end where it mentions released the release 9 has “iPhone OS 1 support in Darwin 9.0.0d1” , which was just a few months after the release of iPhone 1.
So to sum it up, iOS is neither a separate OS from MacOS nor a mere modified version but actually a small part of MacOS.
I did, but Vulkan was never meant to be replacement to OpenGL, read Chronos statement when Vulkan is released. There are some important functions that OpenGl does better than Vulkan. I said read that Houdini developer post. But if Blender changes from OpenGl at some point it will definitly be Vulkan. And taht is where I am concerned, about how will Blender work on OSX. So far only thing we can see is using Molten but we do not know what performances drop we might excpect, which bring us back to where we started, where OpenGl on OSX was behind Win and Linux. Also I disagree on part OpenGl not being useful, already told you, look Evee, that is far from not being useful.
Which makes sense for you developer, but for me 3d artist no. Can I use Photoshop, Blender, Maya or Modo on iOS? No, so for me that is different OS.
Which is why Apple give it another name and markets it as a separate OS that specifically targets its own mobile devices.
But not to worry you wont be seeing Maya, 3ds max, etc anytime soon on mobile platforms. The real reason of course not being the OS, but the actual hardware which is extremely more limited and any software has to be carefully managed not to swallow the battery in mere minutes.
My post was not to stop people thinking them as separate OSes, which I think in terms of simplicity its logical thing to do. Just to point that under the hood things are far more murky and interdependent to be technically possible to have MacOS vs iOS and why that is the case.
And to come back full circle to the original topic , the same applies for OpenGL
The simple explanation is that Apple does not like OpenGL, the technical explanation is far more complex and multidimensional.
I don’t understand why openGL is said to be old. It’s like saying MacOS is old or Windows is old.
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/History_of_OpenGL#OpenGL_4.6_.282017.29
OpenGL 4.6 is from 2017. I checked and I have it installed, by Nvidia drivers. To my understanding even when an application has minimum requirement of openGL 3.2, it actually uses the 4.6; the latest that is installed. Now when the minimun is what ever, but developer has found some great extensions (or what ever they are really called) that uses features from 4.x, then the app reallly uses those features.
And also to my understanding, openGL 1 is really different than 2 or 3. And 4 has some serious advancements too.
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Not to mention Unix. 
One of Apple’s strong technical advantages has always been that they control both the hardware and the software. (A brief foray into “clone-making” was started in the John Sculley days, and immediately nixed when wiser heads prevailed and put Steve back in charge.) iOS and MacOS (OS/X … not the previous thing that “MacOS” referred to) are the same operating system, with obvious hardware-specific differences. (That’s in sharp contrast to Microsoft, which has hung the same trade-name, “Windows,” on a number of different systems that had no relationship whatsoever to one another.)
But – never immediately act upon what Apple says is “the next big thing.” You’ll just go crazy if you try. In this case, if Apple does change the underlying graphics interfaces away from OpenGL, it’s almost certain that someone – might be Apple itself, might not – will create a binary compatibility “thunking” layer between the two. There’s far too much software out there for Unix and for Linux that uses OpenGL calls, to pragmatically allow it to “completely disappear.” Ultimately, it won’t.
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It’s because even though OpenGL 4.6 is new, the underlying architecture has to be backwards compatible with the original OpenGL. OpenGL 4.6 adds to rather than replaces previous versions.
A better analogy would be in the Windows 3.1 days, it had to be completely compatible with MS-DOS. The difference is, when Windows XP was released, they were able to ditch all DOS compatibility constraints. The same is true for OS/X vs System 9.
OpenGL hasn’t been able to ditch it’s history yet. That’s why it is considered old.
Didn’t they say they had to dump backwards compatibility with version 3, or am I missing something?
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