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The real news appears to an approx 30% speed-up between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. That's pretty impressive!
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.
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.
> Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX.
There are plenty of reasons developers go to DirectX, support and tooling being two of them.
On the game consoles, outside Microsoft, regardless what is spread around, game consoles don't support OpenGL, just variations thereof or similar APIs.
For example the PS3 has OpenGL ES 1.0 combined with Cg, not GLSL. In the end most developers use Libcgm anyway.
As for the other consoles they are also other type of APIs.
In the end, the best approach is to have an API agnostic middlelayer and be independent of the underlying API.
Only for that particular GPU he tested: Geforce 660Ti
Let's see if there is any noticeable improvement on lesser or older GPUs.
That is good news. Hopefully this will mean StarCraft 2 runs a bit smoother on my machine since it uses OpenGL.
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.
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.
I agree entirely that Apple's NDA is barely enforced. They don't put anything really special in the previews. They know anyone with $100 can see it, and that the rumor sites will get "emails from anonymous developers" with any interesting specifics not mentioned publicly by Apple.
(In fact, I read a theory somewhere that the NDA is really just about corporate competitive advantage for some legal reason. I forget what it was; it might have been something with the date a technology becomes public re: patent law.)
That said, more than almost anything else, I'd be wary about posting benchmarks. Performance is subject to change wildly between the developer betas and the final product. It could get better with optimizations and taking out debug code; it could get worse if some optimizations are found to be unstable.
If it was just, "Hey, this is awesome! They've implemented through OpenGL 4.1 and their implemenation is significantly faster across all OGL versions!" I'd be less worried. I can imagine a graphics programmer getting twitchy about early numbers.
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)
As far as I understand, this NDA is used to make big newspapers publish reviews of the new OS at the same time to make a concentrate PR effort. If every big newspaper was free to review Mavericks, by the time it got out, no one would care about it. Also, early builds always have bugs and shortcomings and those will be discussed in the reviews. Using NDA Apple makes sure that major media sources release info on the latest, most tested version and at the same time to create necessary effect on the readers.
Those Apple employees should have pointed you to devforums.apple.com, which is the correct place to discuss NDA'd material. The fact that individual employees didn't is in no way indicative of Apple's official position regarding the NDA.
While your first point bears repeating ad infinitum, and everyone who has direct access to the DP and finds something off (however minor) should be filing rdar reports before blogging, the effects of your second point about the NDA is open to interpretation. There's a clause in the confidentiality agreement that prevents it from covering anything that's public knowledge through no fault of your own. Given the extent of the Apple news machine, very few aspects of DPs are outside of public knowledge for very long.
NDA is not that restricted this times in fact... They know that everybody who want to know got an Apple dev account.
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.
Isn't it easy to say where things "should be" when you're not responsible for getting them there.
Actually, graphics drivers provide the OpenGL interface, just like they provide the rendering backend to DirectX. People are going to install graphics drivers anyway if they're going to do GPU stuff.
Are there graphics drivers to install? I've just assumed in stuck with whatever apple provides. does nvidia publish third party osx drivers?
It's still so much better than any other OS.
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
Would you like to elaborate on your position, or just continue smugly toeing the party line?
For example, OSX has really bad (read: no) support for hardware slightly deviating outside of its niche. It also uses an arguably-broken UI metaphor, and has no truly good package management story.
How is it? Linux has 4.3 support (with Nvidia drivers).
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!
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.
This is one of the reasons Mari's finally able to be ported to OS X, as was shown at WWDC.
Perk of being a doctor is a nice short .md domain? ;)
Anyone can register in the .md domain, for $150 per year: http://www.nic.md/
Yikes, Moldovan domains are pricey!
First time I've seen my country's TLD on HackerNews :)
Perk of being a professional is the ability to get a .pro Domain (really).
This website blocks my IP...
That's CloudFlare responding to the influx of HN visitors. Site admin probably has their security setting too high.
It made me enter a captcha too.
I could access the original page. The cached content is a true copy.
for me as well ...
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.
So when are they going to enable 4.3? Soon or in another 3 years?
File radar bug reports requesting 4.3 support and copy the bug under openradar.
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.
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.
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.
Apple only expose the OpenGL bindings via Cocoa. There are many libraries that will expose OpenGL for you. [SDL](http://www.libsdl.org/) and [GLFW](http://www.glfw.org/) are the two most prominent.
Exactly. With Go and GLFW I could write 3D GL apps running the same under Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. No need to mess with OS-specifics if you don't want to. SDL could do the same but since I didn't need Audio and all kinds of "media layers" and what not, GLFW seemed a lot leaner and immediately worked "out of box", too.
well I'm just sad for ogre3d. why only expose it via cocoa ?
> Shoving Nextstep under programmer's throats is really a weird strategy.
No, it is like any vendor that makes developers stick with their own technology. This has been happening in commercial software since the dawn of computing.
We're talking about a language, not just a tech. Vendors always had C++. It's agnostic. Apple and its coolness. I doubt people would use Cocoa without nextstep.
And honestly, right clicking with mac, what a nightmare, always bringing the throbber. When I think about it, apple delivers the software that works with the hardware, but the soft is just cool, it's not really nice to work with. Most features comes from unix anyway. While microsoft was hardware agnostic and allowed the computer industry to grow, Apple just comes in with apparatus and just want people to forget the pain of what allowed the computer industry to grow by delivering both soft and hardware.
You can't make programmers learn a language which works in so many different ways, and expect to create a monopoly on such apps. Or maybe it will take time for crowds to forgets C++ and use cocoa.
Whats the matter with building a Toll-Free Bridge once and forgetting about the problem forever?
what does that even mean
Yeah, well, [your preferred development stack] sucks because [subjective and/or political reason] that [anyone who agrees with me] knows is obviously true. Clearly, [vendor of your preferred development stack] should go spend many years rewriting everything so that my mind can continue living comfortably in the box it's in, safe from the pain of having to learn something different.