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OS X Desktops (Apple) Operating Systems Software Apple Technology

Autodesk Drops Support For Alias, VRED In macOS Mojave Over OpenGL Deprecation (appleinsider.com) 309

"Autodesk has published a support document announcing that it is stopping development of its Alias and VRED vertical market packages, and that older versions will not work on Mojave due to Apple's OpenGL deprecation," writes Stephen Silver for Apple Insider. Alias is software predominantly used in automotive design and industrial design, while VRED is 3D visualization software. From the report: According to a note posted on Autodesk's support website, while older Alias versions can run on High Sierra or earlier, "no versions of VRED will run on that operating system due to the OpenGL deprecation." The change, according to the Autodesk note, "allows Autodesk development teams to focus on bringing innovations to market faster, and allows for more frequent software updates." "In the end, the entire Alias and VRED community will benefit from this streamlined approach," wrote the company.

This follows the announcement by Apple in June at WWDC that Mojave will require graphics hardware to support Metal, and that active development has ceased for OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac. It isn't clear why Autodesk made the declaration that OpenGL's deprecation was responsible for the applications not working in Mojave. Deprecation does not mean removed, and the existing OpenGL implementation in High Sierra remains in Mojave. The move at present does not appear to affect the core AutoDesk product.

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Autodesk Drops Support For Alias, VRED In macOS Mojave Over OpenGL Deprecation

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  • God forbid (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29, 2018 @07:46PM (#57030272)

    Apple should have some sort of a system where the GPU drivers can install their own OpenGL stack, similar to the ICD in Windows.

    It boggles my mind how much money that company has and how poorly written OS X seems to not be able to do the things Windows has been able to do for a decade or more. I'm surprised Autodesk didn't just drop support for OS X entirely and tell Apple to piss off. They actually deserve it this time, especially considering what a clusterfuck Metal 2 is (and it still doesn't support everything OpenGL 4.5 does- nor will it ever, according to Apple- nice mobile API you back ported to the desktop there).

  • by Gojira Shipi-Taro ( 465802 ) on Sunday July 29, 2018 @07:48PM (#57030278) Homepage

    But it sure as fuck means the OS publisher isn't supporting it. If I"m making a product that requires support from the publisher for bugs, security issues, or what have you for a given module, and they drop it on the floor, I drop them on the floor. I'm not going on the hook for something that isn't supported. Not worth the fucking time.

    • Yeah, surely for a forward-thinking developer "deprecated" has pretty much the same effect on your decision-making as "removed".

  • so apple came out and said they wanted professional software then "deprecated" OpenGL

    Apple can reverse this course and sort it out but they need to do it now !

  • by LaughingRadish ( 2694765 ) on Sunday July 29, 2018 @08:02PM (#57030322) Journal

    The original meaning of "The Customer is Always Right" stems from demand for a product, not the parades of boorish people so often seen quoting this adage. More specifically, if customers demand a certain product, then that's the product that should be made. Apple is attempting to cram down the throats of the users something the users don't want.

    • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      This is hardly surprising behavior for Apple, and far from the first time. They have already discovered that they can do the most amazingly abusive shit and still the sheeplike fanbois/girls will bend over and religiously continue to overpay for Apple hardware.

  • Time Cook should start reading Slashdot, right? So coulda avoided this embarrassing mistake. Looking forward to the upcoming walkback, how can Apple PR hacks possibly spin that as anything other than ignominious capitulation?

    • probably not.
      They refused to support java on mobile, and lost virtually all their market share in a decade.
      refusing to support vulkan just means they get shut out of the Vr wave.

      Apple isn't dying, its dead already, just gonna take a bit longer for Goldman Sachs to unwind their positions.

  • it was the one thing they had going for them from both a high end app and game standpoint. e.g. that they used a well known library. Who's going to put the work into writing to Apple's custom library? Maybe for iPhone games, but it kind of kills the desktop.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29, 2018 @11:50PM (#57031068)

      OpenGL is shit and has always been shit. It has a convoluted API that was designed around configuring fixed-function 3D rasterisers and is ill-suited to programmable GPUs, multi-threading and has extremely high overhead for modern graphics pipelines from the multitude of function calls and GPU state validations.

      Metal, Vulkan, D3D12 are all very similar in the way they offer lightweight APIs that are a minimal abstraction of modern programmable GPUs and are designed to work in multi-threaded, multi-process environments.

      In my opinion as a crusty old games developer, all of the new-generation APIs are inspired by Sony/Nvidia's GCM library from the PlayStation 3, which in itself draws upon the PlayStation 2's GS & DMAC libraries.

      • OpenGL is shit and has always been shit. It has a convoluted API that was designed around configuring fixed-function 3D rasterisers and is ill-suited to programmable GPUs, multi-threading and has extremely high overhead for modern graphics pipelines from the multitude of function calls and GPU state validations.

        Metal, Vulkan, D3D12 are all very similar in the way they offer lightweight APIs that are a minimal abstraction of modern programmable GPUs and are designed to work in multi-threaded, multi-process environments.

        Correct. OpenGL is an antique API - if you have a modern high end video card (like a GTX 1050 or higher) OpenGL will run like crap on it - it just has too much overhead causing most of the power to go underutilized.

        The big problem is what OS X is going to use - Metal, Vulkan and the like all came out around the same time because of the issues of OpenGL One should note when Metal came out, Vulkan was actually AMD's API set - it was donated to Khronos to offer a standardized next-generation API set, and renamed to Vulkan. We are in a huge transition period where legacy apps will need to be ported over to take advantage of modern video card performance.

    • it was the one thing they had going for them from both a high end app and game standpoint. e.g. that they used a well known library. Who's going to put the work into writing to Apple's custom library? Maybe for iPhone games, but it kind of kills the desktop.

      Considering the graphics requirements of the average videogame running on an iOS device running Metal, vs the average Desktop CAD Application, I simply don't see why it would be such an onerous task for AutoDesk to provide Metal API support. After all, they already have iOS Applications that presumably use Metal in the App Store...

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      They're not dropping it, simply stopping further internal development. OpenGL is pretty much legacy at this point, the most used implementation is ~10 years old and Khronos has moved on to Vulkan (basically OpenGL 5).

      Khronos initially wanted money for Vulkan so Apple went off on their own and developed Metal, now Khronos is releasing their own Vulkan libraries for Mac and iOS (and made MoltenVK royalty-free, although not patent-free).

      • Khronos initially wanted money for Vulkan so Apple went off on their own and developed Metal

        Not quite. Apple created Metal [wikipedia.org] a couple of years before Vulkan [wikipedia.org] was first released. So Apple first released Metal in 2014 and the Khronos Group first announced Vulkan in 2015. The first release of Vulkan was in 2016.

        Who was first does not really matter. Just wanted to note that the motivation for developing Metal was to improve performance / battery life in iOS devices. It was not a vanity project driven by the need to do everything on their own. Well maybe partially, but there were no good alternat

  • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Sunday July 29, 2018 @10:34PM (#57030820) Homepage

    If you can't seek support from your library vendors, then it's completely understandable to drop support for the platform. This is exactly what anyone with half a mind knew was going to happen when Apple announced they were dropping support for OpenGL.

  • But it means it is essentially an unsupported part of the system.
    Apple: We will not support OpenGL in the future.
    Autodesk: Then we will not support macOS in the future.

  • "Autodesk has published a support document announcing that it is stopping development of its Alias and VRED vertical market packages,"

    No, this is not true, what is true is:

    "Autodesk has published a support document announcing that it is stopping development of its Alias and VRED vertical market packages for macOS", or as the support document on their knowledge base says, "Discontinuation of Mac Support for Autodesk Alias and VRED".

    In other words, development for other platforms that haven't deprecated OpenG

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