Apple defends end of OpenGL as Mac game developers threaten to leave

Introducing four new operating systems simultaneously gives Apple the annual opportunity to bury bad news under good headlines, and 2018’s WWDC was no exception: iOS, macOS, and tvOS will stop supporting the popular cross-platform graphics renderer OpenGL in favor of Apple’s Metal. After some game developers publicly threatened to stop making Mac games, Apple explained its reasoning last night at a Metal for OpenGL Developers session.

Metal developer liaison Dan Omachi explained that OpenGL was designed 25 years ago when 3D graphics were in their earliest days, and has kept going thanks to extensions for modern GPU features. But the fundamentals of 3D rendering have changed, including the overall GPU pipeline, multithreaded operations, and asynchronous processing. So while PCs shifted to Vulkan, Apple created Metal, seeking GPU/CPU efficiency, predictability, and resource control, particularly for its modern A-series processors.