27 ms·

> The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS. Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an exi

> The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS. Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. They even failed to follow the Godot contribution guide for the PR itself.

eksu 1y ago
OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan. If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens. Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Ah, I guess that is why Nintendo and Sony also don't have games.
  - meindnoch 1y ago
    >This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games Yeah, that's why iOS doesn't have any games either. /s
  - p_ing 1y ago
    APIs are the last reason there aren't 'major' games on macOS. You've got architecture changes; PPC to Intel was a big loss of game compatibility, and then again when x86-32 support was removed from OS X nuked most of a user's Steam library. And there's the chicken/egg problem of gamers just not being present in large enough numbers on macOS. The platform already has a fairly small marketshare in the overall PC space, the number of gamers are vanishingly much smaller; Steam stats put macOS at 1.58%, less than Linux. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey All of the major game engines support Apple's Metal, so API compat from that perspective isn't an issue.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      APIs are the exact reason. Why can't you run Proton on MacOS? WoW64 works. Rosetta and Wine work. Is there any technical limitation besides API support preventing the Macbook from working like a Steam Deck?
      - p_ing 1y ago
        Proton relies on Linux sys APIs not available on macOS, but the Porting Toolkit is available. I've been able to "play" Noita on my M2 Air (granted the perf sucks, but that's what I get for owning an Air). This discussion hasn't been centered around kernel APIs, but rather graphics APIs (D3D/Vulkan), if you're going for that "gotcha!". Crossover is another option, though I have no need to pay for it as I own a Windows PC/consoles. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton_for_mac/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton...
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    It’s more that devs can’t be arsed to write non-mobile games in anything but DirectX unless they’re being paid to (as the console vendors do). Vulkan support is quite rare in commercial games, it’s almost entirely DirectX or Sony/Nintendo’s things. If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change. The single biggest things Apple could do to bolster gaming on their platforms is to pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. Anything else will barely move the needle.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      > If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change. That's not entirely true. Whiskey being depreciated to support Codeweavers was a headline story this week - something that outright would not need to exist if Apple users could run upstream DXVK instead of GPTk. > pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. That doesn't work either! Paying Eidos and Capcom and Hello Games did not start an avalanche of ports. Apple could license DirectX from Microsoft, but they could also just support Vulkan 1.2 and get perfect DX12 coverage through translation. The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. We can argue over the merits of Vulkan until the cows come home, but the simple issue is that Metal doesn't get ports. Native APIs on Apple platforms just get ignored.
      - orangecat 1y ago
        The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. For macOS, no. For iOS, yes, and that's where Apple makes almost all their revenue. Apple wants your primary target to be iOS. If you decide to do a macOS port, that's nice but not essential. Of course this doesn't work for AAA games, but that's a sacrifice they're happy to make.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. Vulkan and DirectX are the favored graphics rendering technologies for VR. Godot supports Vulkan rendering via OpenXR. To get a vibe for Apple’s general posture in this regard it is worth noting that Vulkan rendering through OpenXR on macOS is technically possible via MoltenVK, but macOS does not have an official OpenXR runtime. You’d need to use third-party workarounds or wait for broader support.
  - eksu 1y ago
    macOS used to have OpenVR support (SteamVR) around 2017 for the HTC Vive, yes, but never any OpenXR runtime as no later hmds had macOS support.
- serbuvlad 1y ago
  > why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Why is this the dichotomy? Why not support both?
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    Money
- freedomben 1y ago
  > If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? I have a natural inclination to agree with this thinking, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the sunk cost fallacy at work[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
josephg 1y ago
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL. Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things. The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  I think people are (rightfully) upset at the business-oriented decisions that limit MacOS as a platform, prevent competition on iOS and demand annual tithes from their developers like they're peons tilling land for coin. These are fair criticisms, prosecuted in a few courts even, and well within the realm of reasonable change. Apple makes great things for their users when they collaborate with the industry. That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards and demand convergence on suspicious centralized cloud crap.
  - troupo 1y ago
    > That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards Is DirectX a standard? Is Playstation NDK (or whatever it's called) a standard? Vulkan is not a "standard". It's a designed-by-committee API that arrived on the scene years after "non-standard" APIs.
    - kimixa 1y ago
      > It's a designed-by-committee API So a "standard"? Maybe I'm biased as I was involved with the standardization - but the whole point of a standard is something is legally possible to implement, communicates the needed information to the layer below, and general enough that it doesn't require specific hardware. All boxes are checked by Vulkan? At least that was the intention. So what if the origin of Vulkan was AMD's donation of Mantle, and the committee knocked the "hardware specific" points off - isn't that the desired result?
willtemperley 1y ago
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. Why the vitriol? Apple did in fact initiate and co-create the WebGPU standard [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU Edit to include quote of parent comment.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  I don’t know that that is relevant. In this context, what’s relevant is OpenXR. Apple’s visionOS does not natively support OpenXR, the open standard developed by the Khronos Group for cross-platform AR/VR development. Apple has not indicated any plans to adopt OpenXR, choosing instead to promote its proprietary frameworks such as ARKit, RealityKit, and PolySpatial for spatial computing on the Vision Pro. What Apple is finding, however, is that there’s virtually no consumer or developer appetite for visionOS / Vision Pro.
  - willtemperley 1y ago
    You probably didn't see the comment I was replying to. I should have quoted: > Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. This is patently false given the fact I posted.
    - furyofantares 1y ago
      I don't see how you can say it's patently false. Do you have any proof that hell didn't freeze over before then?
      - freedomben 1y ago
        An excellent comment for it's humor value. (not to ruin the humor with an explanation, but this is a masterful use of sophistry as it's logically sound, but clearly not a serious argument). Now to add to the unhelpfulness in what I hope is a humorous way, we in fact have some evidence that hell did freeze over: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/08/260735693/hell-has-frozen-over-headline-writers-rejoice https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/08/260735693...
greenknight 1y ago
Correct... But from my understanding... OpenXR isnt reliant on OpenGL? it supports Vulkan, DirectX and metal -- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872
wat10000 1y ago
POSIX? C++? HTML? USB? There are plenty of existing open standards that Apple conforms and contributes to. When open source types complain about this, I always enjoy the irony that macOS is POSIX compliant while Linux is not.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Those are fantastic examples. At the same time it begs the question: why does Apple not play nicely with graphics standards? It could be that the those standards bodies are dysfunctional or too slow so Apple has to go their own way. However, I suspect that that is not the main reason.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Being too slow certainly seems to be part of it. Metal was released two years before Vulkan, for example.
SirBill 1y ago
"Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard." Counterpoint: WebKit and Swift.

eksu 1y ago

OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan. If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.

bigyabai 1y ago
In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens. Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Ah, I guess that is why Nintendo and Sony also don't have games.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  >This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games Yeah, that's why iOS doesn't have any games either. /s
- p_ing 1y ago
  APIs are the last reason there aren't 'major' games on macOS. You've got architecture changes; PPC to Intel was a big loss of game compatibility, and then again when x86-32 support was removed from OS X nuked most of a user's Steam library. And there's the chicken/egg problem of gamers just not being present in large enough numbers on macOS. The platform already has a fairly small marketshare in the overall PC space, the number of gamers are vanishingly much smaller; Steam stats put macOS at 1.58%, less than Linux. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey All of the major game engines support Apple's Metal, so API compat from that perspective isn't an issue.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    APIs are the exact reason. Why can't you run Proton on MacOS? WoW64 works. Rosetta and Wine work. Is there any technical limitation besides API support preventing the Macbook from working like a Steam Deck?
    - p_ing 1y ago
      Proton relies on Linux sys APIs not available on macOS, but the Porting Toolkit is available. I've been able to "play" Noita on my M2 Air (granted the perf sucks, but that's what I get for owning an Air). This discussion hasn't been centered around kernel APIs, but rather graphics APIs (D3D/Vulkan), if you're going for that "gotcha!". Crossover is another option, though I have no need to pay for it as I own a Windows PC/consoles. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton_for_mac/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton...
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  It’s more that devs can’t be arsed to write non-mobile games in anything but DirectX unless they’re being paid to (as the console vendors do). Vulkan support is quite rare in commercial games, it’s almost entirely DirectX or Sony/Nintendo’s things. If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change. The single biggest things Apple could do to bolster gaming on their platforms is to pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. Anything else will barely move the needle.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    > If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change. That's not entirely true. Whiskey being depreciated to support Codeweavers was a headline story this week - something that outright would not need to exist if Apple users could run upstream DXVK instead of GPTk. > pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. That doesn't work either! Paying Eidos and Capcom and Hello Games did not start an avalanche of ports. Apple could license DirectX from Microsoft, but they could also just support Vulkan 1.2 and get perfect DX12 coverage through translation. The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. We can argue over the merits of Vulkan until the cows come home, but the simple issue is that Metal doesn't get ports. Native APIs on Apple platforms just get ignored.
    - orangecat 1y ago
      The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. For macOS, no. For iOS, yes, and that's where Apple makes almost all their revenue. Apple wants your primary target to be iOS. If you decide to do a macOS port, that's nice but not essential. Of course this doesn't work for AAA games, but that's a sacrifice they're happy to make.
andsoitis 1y ago
> OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. Vulkan and DirectX are the favored graphics rendering technologies for VR. Godot supports Vulkan rendering via OpenXR. To get a vibe for Apple’s general posture in this regard it is worth noting that Vulkan rendering through OpenXR on macOS is technically possible via MoltenVK, but macOS does not have an official OpenXR runtime. You’d need to use third-party workarounds or wait for broader support.
- eksu 1y ago
  macOS used to have OpenVR support (SteamVR) around 2017 for the HTC Vive, yes, but never any OpenXR runtime as no later hmds had macOS support.
serbuvlad 1y ago
> why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Why is this the dichotomy? Why not support both?
- Zambyte 1y ago
  Money
freedomben 1y ago
> If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? I have a natural inclination to agree with this thinking, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the sunk cost fallacy at work[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

josephg 1y ago

> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL. Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things. The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.

bigyabai 1y ago
I think people are (rightfully) upset at the business-oriented decisions that limit MacOS as a platform, prevent competition on iOS and demand annual tithes from their developers like they're peons tilling land for coin. These are fair criticisms, prosecuted in a few courts even, and well within the realm of reasonable change. Apple makes great things for their users when they collaborate with the industry. That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards and demand convergence on suspicious centralized cloud crap.
- troupo 1y ago
  > That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards Is DirectX a standard? Is Playstation NDK (or whatever it's called) a standard? Vulkan is not a "standard". It's a designed-by-committee API that arrived on the scene years after "non-standard" APIs.
  - kimixa 1y ago
    > It's a designed-by-committee API So a "standard"? Maybe I'm biased as I was involved with the standardization - but the whole point of a standard is something is legally possible to implement, communicates the needed information to the layer below, and general enough that it doesn't require specific hardware. All boxes are checked by Vulkan? At least that was the intention. So what if the origin of Vulkan was AMD's donation of Mantle, and the committee knocked the "hardware specific" points off - isn't that the desired result?

willtemperley 1y ago

> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. Why the vitriol? Apple did in fact initiate and co-create the WebGPU standard [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU Edit to include quote of parent comment.

andsoitis 1y ago
I don’t know that that is relevant. In this context, what’s relevant is OpenXR. Apple’s visionOS does not natively support OpenXR, the open standard developed by the Khronos Group for cross-platform AR/VR development. Apple has not indicated any plans to adopt OpenXR, choosing instead to promote its proprietary frameworks such as ARKit, RealityKit, and PolySpatial for spatial computing on the Vision Pro. What Apple is finding, however, is that there’s virtually no consumer or developer appetite for visionOS / Vision Pro.
- willtemperley 1y ago
  You probably didn't see the comment I was replying to. I should have quoted: > Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. This is patently false given the fact I posted.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    I don't see how you can say it's patently false. Do you have any proof that hell didn't freeze over before then?
    - freedomben 1y ago
      An excellent comment for it's humor value. (not to ruin the humor with an explanation, but this is a masterful use of sophistry as it's logically sound, but clearly not a serious argument). Now to add to the unhelpfulness in what I hope is a humorous way, we in fact have some evidence that hell did freeze over: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/08/260735693/hell-has-frozen-over-headline-writers-rejoice https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/08/260735693...

greenknight 1y ago

Correct... But from my understanding... OpenXR isnt reliant on OpenGL? it supports Vulkan, DirectX and metal -- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872

wat10000 1y ago

POSIX? C++? HTML? USB? There are plenty of existing open standards that Apple conforms and contributes to. When open source types complain about this, I always enjoy the irony that macOS is POSIX compliant while Linux is not.

andsoitis 1y ago
Those are fantastic examples. At the same time it begs the question: why does Apple not play nicely with graphics standards? It could be that the those standards bodies are dysfunctional or too slow so Apple has to go their own way. However, I suspect that that is not the main reason.
- wat10000 1y ago
  Being too slow certainly seems to be part of it. Metal was released two years before Vulkan, for example.

SirBill 1y ago

"Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard." Counterpoint: WebKit and Swift.