And yet, Snow Leopard offers no 3.x features. Apple sits on the OpenGL ARB they knew this was coming. How are Apple not caring about cross-platform compatibility?īecause OpenGL has had 3 version changes sense then, one of them being a major version change. OpenGL2.1 will work across the board on any platform (Apple, Linux etc. Not good for Apple, not good for MacOS X, not good for hardware makers, and not good for OpenGL. What matters is that on new versions of Windows, you can get access to new hardware features. Whether you believe that they had good reasons for this or that it was “based on marketing operating system revisions for a closed eco system” is irrelevant. Yes, Microsoft limited the backwards compatibility of DX10. Microsoft has exposed new hardware features on a new OS Apple did not. MacOSX just had a new revision… without 3.x support. At that point, the lack of backwards compatibility in XP becomes irrelevant. XP is a dying OS there will be fewer users of it in the future until it eventually become negligable. Apple prevents this, just like Microsoft prevents D3D10 capable cards from exposing D3D10 operations on XP.
#Update opengl mac mac#
Your GL 3.x capable card cannot expose extensions that allow for accessing GL 3.x features on Mac OSX. In both cases, it is one specific entity that is preventing support for these in the larger set.
Again, there is one point of division between versions of OpenGL supported on different OS’s offering OpenGL support. Only non-Apple desktop platforms support OpenGL 3.x and above.
So there is only one point of division between versions of D3D supported on different OS’s offering D3D support.Īll desktop platforms support OpenGL 2.1. And that this is not true of Microsoft and Direct3D.Īll of the current Windows platform support DX9.
#Update opengl mac code#
You said that code written to GL 2.1 on MacOSX would work just the same on any GL 2.1 implementation. How is it “exactly the same” ? And I am still not getting your earlier point. And if they want GL 3.x on Macs, then they can start throwing their weight around with Apple (though, thanks to iPhone and the App store, that isn’t very much weight these days). They’ve got a pair of games coming out in the near future (near in Blizzard-time, of course).
If not, then there is nothing that can be done unless Apple chooses to do it.īlizzard is probably our best friend here. If they can, then they can get around Apple’s slow improvement easily enough. I don’t know enough about Mac OpenGL implementations, but I would hope that they can expose extensions. Many 3.x GL features are exposed as ARB core extensions. If Apple simply doesn’t have the time/resources to keep OpenGL on MacOSX up to date while also doing all of the other things they’re doing, then there is nothing anyone can do about it. If Apple wants to freeze OpenGL at 2.1 on MacOSX, there is nothing anyone can do about it.
But it also means that Apple controls all of OpenGL on MacOSX. On MacOSX machines, Apple has taken the liberty to essentially do what Microsoft does with Direct3D: define a part of the implementation and allow IHVs to implement a lower-level API that Apple defines. It is left to the different vendors to implement that document.
#Update opengl mac pdf#
OpenGL is a specification: a PDF document. You ask that question as though there is or can be a plan to overcome it.