





Here is the statement we can read in these weekly Blender developer meeting notes:

Our very active OS X platform maintainer for many years, Jens Verwiebe – had a suprising statement. He’s going to abandon OS X as a serious 3D/graphics development platform. This, he said, because of lack of quality GPU support (OpenGL, OpenCL) and annoying Yosemite glitches. It makes this platform too painful to keep using seriously. Jens will stay around for at least the 2.75 release. Martijn Berger volunteered to take over duties.

What a pity that Apple does not put more resources to have a serious OpenGL (as well as OpenCL according to the statement –I never coded with the OpenCL API on Mac OS X, so I have nothing to say about OSX/CL) support. OpenGL is tightly embedded in OS X and is a crucial element of Apple’s operating system. OS X has some cool OpenGL features like IOSurface (to share GPU data between application, the best example is Syphon –that makes me thinking I have to write a short article on that subject to show how to use it with GLSL Hacker…) or virtual screens, there is even a 100% CPU OpenGL renderer (GLSL Hacker has an option to enable software rendering on OS X).

All these nice features are often hidden by an outdated OpenGL: still several years behind what we can find on Windows and Linux. Okay there is OpenGL 4.1 on OS X, but I can’t still play with my compute shaders / SSBO demo because… the demo requires an old (for Windows and Linux users) OpenGL 4.3 (GL 4.1 has been released in 2010 and GL 4.3 in 2012). Today, the latest specification is OpenGL 4.5 (released last year). Unlike on Linux or Windows, OpenGL is fundamental for Apple’s OS and Mac OS X should have the best OpenGL implementation and support, that’s all!

My main platform for development is Windows and I code on OS X and Linux mainly to update, fix or compile GLSL Hacker. So OS X bugs or lack of features don’t bother too much 😉

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