
OpenGL – OS X Mountain Lion vs. Mavericks - ingve
http://rk.md/2013/opengl-osx-mountain-lion-vs-mavericks/
======
codeka
The real news appears to an approx 30% speed-up between Mountain Lion and
Mavericks. That's pretty impressive!

~~~
jlouis
Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX.
While DX is good and all that, I would much prefer to see an Open Standard
prevail in this space.

~~~
angersock
That's cute and all, but you probably--deep down--don't actually want that
open standard to be OpenGL. OGL is a crufty, messy API, and even now support
is spotty for the different versions.

For a very long time, for example, OGL 2.1 was the only thing supported by
Apple, despite numerous extensions to bring it up to feature-parity with
modern OGL. Vendor extensions made programming code a mess, and many of the
core concepts as embodied in the API are minefields for developers.

Don't hate on DX just because it's from Microsoft--an open re-implementation
would actually help everyone.

~~~
ianlevesque
There's been some progress on one already, the d3d1x state tracker from
Gallium3d is an implementation of D3D 10/11 directly on top of the GPU drivers
on Linux, without using OpenGL as an intermediary.

~~~
figglesonrails
That driver was shelved a long time ago. :(

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pflats
I'm not denying that this is interesting information, but it seems a little
foolish to post, given that Mavericks is:

1\. Only in developer preview and subject to change (for better and for
worse).

2\. Under NDA.

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
I do not think that Apple is taking it's own NDA seriously. It may just be
there to be on the safe side. When Lion came out I had a look at some of the
new API it had - while it still was under NDA. I had a couple of problems with
the new API so I posted a request for help on G+. Some of Apple's own
employees responded to my request.

This does not show that Apple as a company does not really care if you are
publishing a very short comparison of one tiny tiny aspect of something that
is still under NDA but I doubt they do.

NDAs are overrated in general.

~~~
tazjin
People like John Gruber, who have close relationships to Apple and are - in
theory - also under the same NDA openly talk about betas and previews on their
blogs, podcasts and so on.

(Just saying this to support what you said)

~~~
arrrg
People like John Gruber have long been talking about unreleased software from
Apple under the assumption that any information that is public is fair game
(i.e. if you talk about something that you could have read on Macrumors there
is no problem).

I’m not sure whether that would actually hold up legally – but that’s the
theory.

(Also, Apple doesn’t seem to be very interested in actually stopping sites
like Macrumors – which are filled to the brim with every tiny detail about the
iOS and OS X DP – from actually publishing that. So I guess they are even less
interested in going after people who do not even show videos or screenshots.)

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mtgx
OpenGL 4.1 means it's still 2 years behind where it should be, but it's
progress, I suppose. It would be nice if Windows supported OpenGL by default,
too.

~~~
lucian1900
It's still so much better than any other OS.

~~~
raverbashing
Maybe if you use the latest kernel, get the latest driver for the manufacture,
recompile X, Mesa, and a bunch of other modules you can get OpenGL 4.2 on
Linux (with a ton of bugs)

Yes, I'm sticking to Mac OS X

~~~
figglesonrails
No, you can't get OpenGL 4.x on Linux. You can't even get GL 3.3 -- geometry
shader support is in it infancy. A quick look at mesa3d-dev or phoronix will
show you that.

~~~
dman
You are incorrect. Nvidia had 4.3 running on linux the day 4.3 was announced.
AMD followed a month or so later after the announcement.

~~~
figglesonrails
I think you're missing the implicit "open source" in this statement. The OP
mentioned "recompile Mesa" and getting buggy 4.x support. No open source
driver supports 4.x yet. I'm aware that proprietary drivers are far ahead, see
my other posts.

~~~
magicalist
The "implicit" open source in that statement is more than a little important
to state explicitly. You're correct (AFAIK) about open driver support, but
many many people use Linux, support free software, but are willing to install
the nvidia or amd drivers for the performance benefits they bring so they can
get work done. Especially if you're willing to cave and just use a Mac, I
think the comparison to nvidia's closed drivers is a fine one.

~~~
figglesonrails
I don't mean this in a bad way, but if someone says "recompile Mesa", I take
it for granted that the understood context is "open source drivers". I didn't
mean to confuse anyone.

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coldcode
When I worked for an MMO game company I constantly got dinged for OSX's
ancient OpenGL support which limited what we could do (being cross platform).
Now that I don't need it anymore they go way forward. Still it's great
support. And add in the Borg Trash Can's dual video cards for lots of fun!

~~~
danudey
Funnily enough, only one of those two FirePros are connected up as a 'graphics
chip'.

The intent of the Mac Pro, when you look at it, is to be a small, lightweight,
ridiculously powerful OpenCL workstation. It has a single Xeon to handle
systems tasks, two FirePros (one of which does graphics and computation, the
other does only computation), and PCIe SSDs to keep the OpenCL cores fed and
store their data.

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berkut
This is one of the reasons Mari's finally able to be ported to OS X, as was
shown at WWDC.

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thejosh
Perk of being a doctor is a nice short .md domain? ;)

~~~
codeka
Anyone can register in the .md domain, for $150 per year:
[http://www.nic.md/](http://www.nic.md/)

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Yikes, Moldovan domains are pricey!

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so898
This website blocks my IP...

~~~
signed0
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Frk.md%2F2013%2Fopengl-
osx-mountain-lion-vs-
mavericks%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Frk.md%2F2013%2Fopengl-osx-mountain-lion-
vs-mavericks%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.2585j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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ksec
The questions i had in my mind, Are Apple still involved in the OpenGL /
OpenCL development?

It seems OpenGL, didn't move or improve much at all in recent years and OpenCL
has had much news.

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shmerl
So when are they going to enable 4.3? Soon or in another 3 years?

~~~
mitchty
File radar bug reports requesting 4.3 support and copy the bug under
openradar.

[http://openradar.appspot.com/](http://openradar.appspot.com/)

The more people that request it the more resources they throw at things. So if
they keep this yearly update schedule maybe mountain mavericks or whatever the
hell they name the next release might have it.

I submitted a bug report to help things along. I don't find posting non useful
replies on Hacker News to be very productive at getting change to occur. Apple
is far from perfect, but they do pay attention to how many people complain
about the same thing in their bug tracker.

~~~
shmerl
Asking to keep OpenGL up to date through bug reports just because Apple don't
care to do it in timely manner themselves sounds waay far from perfect to me.
But developers have to deal with what exists of course.

~~~
mitchty
What it is is showing Apple that OpenGL matters to those developers. It is
likely more a case of priority shifting, if not enough people request it it is
deemed a lower priority. Until you make it known en masse it can't be pointed
to by engineers as needing to be worked on.

Would it be ideal if Apple did everything HN commentators wanted? Well no,
most of the requests here can be a bit ludicrous. But if you're a developer on
Apple and you do not file a bug report specifying the need for up to date
OpenGL, complaining here isn't productive. I will leave the hyperbole about
"far from perfect" aside as all human endeavors are far from perfect and hate
the platform wars that proliferate here.

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jokoon
The only thing I dislike about apple, is that it forces you to use cocoa to
use opengl. As a C++ programmer and Ogre3D user, it put a lot of pain in the
porting process.

Maybe OpenGL is better with apple, but C++ is not. Shoving Nextstep under
programmer's throats is really a weird strategy.

~~~
adventureloop
Apple only expose the OpenGL bindings via Cocoa. There are many libraries that
will expose OpenGL for you.
[SDL]([http://www.libsdl.org/](http://www.libsdl.org/)) and
[GLFW]([http://www.glfw.org/](http://www.glfw.org/)) are the two most
prominent.

~~~
jokoon
well I'm just sad for ogre3d. why only expose it via cocoa ?

~~~
dualogy
You misunderstood him. He's not saying "only cocoa exposes gl", he said "cocoa
only (as in _just_ ) _exposes_ GL, but other cross-platform libs also expose
it for you if you prefer not to deal with cocoa".

