During Apple’s WWDC 2013 keynote, the graphically-inclined may have noted “OpenGL 4” among OS X Mavericks’ feature list. I was curious and decided to study OpenGL support between Mountain Lion and the developer preview of Mavericks. The comparison was done on my non-production workstation using OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4) and OS X Mavericks (10.9 DP1). I utilized OpenGL Extensions Viewer 4.0.8 (App Store version) for the following assessment.

First, I looked at the OpenGL core feature support (Core OpenGL profile, SGI database).

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

OS X Mavericks (10.9 DP1)

One can see that while Mountain Lion didn’t even completely support OpenGL 3.3, Mavericks has support through OpenGL 4.1. 🙂

Next, I did a compatibility test for OpenGL 1.1 – 2.1 using the default settings (cube, default frame buffer, etc.) The results speak for themselves.

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

OS X Mavericks (10.9 DP1)

While I completely understand that this is a crude assessment and the aforementioned results could easily change (for better or worse) in subsequent OSX 10.9 builds, it’s nice to see more modern graphics libraries being incorporated into OS X.