* Nvidia’s post-Tesla designs are all certified compatible with OpenGL 4.5 * Haswell IGPs are limited to OpenGL 4.2, Broadwell to 4.3, and Skylake to 4.4 I suspect featureset fragmentation between different vendors and models may be an issue: The latest stable version is OpenGL 4.5, from last year. OS X’s latest supported OpenGL revision is 4.1, unveiled in 2010.
The rise of Vulkan for gaming and realtime rendering means that OpenGL will likely become even more conservative, existing for backwards compatibility’s sake and principally facilitating the needs of professional and workstation developers going forward.Įdit: Did a little more thinking about this over my lunch break.
Metal will exist as a nice bridge between development on iOS and OS X, and Apple’s control over it will make it a nice option for their homegrown apps. It’s likely to become the non-Direct3D standard for game development outside of the Windows ecosystem, and there’s enough broad industry support for that to become likely. Vulkan will probably appear on OS X as a bulletpoint feature.
Like other recent OS X releases, it'll be a free upgrade. OS X El Capitan will be available to developers today, with a public beta set to begin in July and a general release to follow in the fall. One final improvement is a cursor-finding gesture that will helpfully enlarge the system's mouse pointer if you wiggle it upon waking up the system. Safari will also identify tabs playing audio and let users mute them with a couple of clicks. Tabs in Safari can be pinned to the tab bar, and they'll persist and refresh automatically every time the browser is opened. Apple has improved the Spotlight search function, which can now accept natural-language queries system-wide.
Full-screen apps can now share the screen with a split view similar to that in Windows 8, and new full-screen or split view Spaces can now be created right from the Mission Control view. OS X's Mission Control window management system is more powerful in El Capitan. Epic claimed a 70% reduction in CPU overhead with Metal versus traditional OpenGL rendering on the Mac. Developers from Epic took the stage to demonstrate Metal with a live demo of the Unreal Engine running one of the studio's latest games, Fortnite.
With Metal, apps and games on the Mac could enjoy the same kinds of performance improvements we're expecting from software optimized for DirectX 12 and Vulkan on the PC. It's called El Capitan, and though it doesn't bring any earth-shattering changes to the user interface, there is one major new feature that Mac gamers and professional users may appreciate: the Metal low-overhead graphics API from iOS is now available on Macs. At its WWDC keynote today, Apple introduced the next version of OS X, bringing another slice of California to Mac users everywhere.