> It's officially deprecated in favor of Vulkan
Can you provide a reference for this? I work in the GPU driver space (not on either of these apis), but from my understanding Vulkan wasn't meant to replace OpenGL, it was only introduced to give developers the chance at getting lower level in the hardware (still agnostic from the hardware, at least compared to compiling PTX/CUDA or against AMD's PAL directly, many still think they failed.) I would still highly advocate for developers using OpenGL or dx11 if their game/software doesn't need the capabilities of Vulkan or dx12. And even if you did, you might be able to get away with interop and do small parts with the lower api and leave everything else in the higher api.
I will admit I don't like the trend of all the fancy new features only getting introduced into Vulkan and dx12, but I'm not sure how to change that trend.
I think Vulkan was originally called OpenGL Next. Furthermore, Vulkan's verbosity allows for a level of control of the graphics pipeline you simply can't have with OpenGL, on top of having built in support for things like dynamic rendering, bindless descriptors, push constants, etc.
Those are the main reasons IMO why most people say it's deprecated.
I only play with this stuff as a hobbiest. But OpenGL is way more simple than Vulkan I think. Vulkan is really really complicated to get some basic stuff going.
Which is as-designed. Vulkan (and DX12, and Metal) is a much more low-level API, precisely because that's what professional 3D engine developers asked for.
Closer to the hardware, more control, fewer workarounds because the driver is doing something "clever" hidden behind the scenes. The tradeoff is greater complexity.
Mere mortals are supposed to use a game engine, or a scene graph library (e.g. VulkanSceneGraph), or stick with OpenGL for now.
The long-term future for OpenGL is to be implemented on top of Vulkan (specifically the Mesa Zink driver that the blog post author is the main developer of).
> Closer to the hardware
To what hardware? Ancient desktop GPUs vs modern desktop GPUs? Ancient smartphones? Modern smartphones? Consoles? Vulkan is an abstraction of a huge set of diverging hardware architectures.
And a pretty bad one, on my opinion. If you need to make an abstraction due to fundamentally different hardware, then at least make an abstraction that isn't terribly overengineered for little to no gain.
Closer to AMD and mobile hardware. We got abominations like monolithic pipelines and layout transition thanks to the first, and render passes thanks to the latter. Luckily all of these are out or on their way out.
Not really, other than on desktops, because as we all know mobile hardware gets the drivers it gets on release date, and that's it.
Hence why on Android, even with Google nowadays enforcing Vulkan, if you want to deal with a less painful experience in driver bugs, better stick with OpenGL ES, outside Pixel and Samsung phones.
Trying to fit both mobile and desktop in the same API was just a mistake. Even applications that target both desktop and mobile end up having significantly different render paths despite using the same API.
I fully expect it to be split into Vulkan ES sooner or later.
100%. Metal is actually self-described as a high level graphics library for this very reason. I’ve never actually used it on non-Apple hardware, but the abstractions for vendor support is there. And they are definitely abstract. There is no real getting-your-hands-dirty exposure of the underlying hardware
Metal does have to support AMD and Intel GPUs for another year after all, and had to support NVIDIA for a hot minute too.
Wow, what a brain fart. So much of metal has improved since M-series, I just forgot it was even the same framework entirely. Even the stack is different now that we have metal cpp and swift++ interop with unified memory access.
> fewer workarounds because the driver is doing something "clever" hidden behind the scenes.
I would be very surprised if current Vulkan drivers are any different in this regard, and if yes then probably only because Vulkan isn't as popular as D3D for PC games.
Vulkan is in a weird place that it promised a low-level explicit API close to the hardware, but then still doesn't really match any concrete GPU architecture and it still needs to abstract over very different GPU architectures.
At the very least there should have been different APIs for desktop and mobile GPUs (not that the GL vs GLES split was great, but at least that way the requirements for mobile GPUs don't hold back the desktop API).
And then there's the issue that also ruined OpenGL: the vendor extension mess.
> specifically the Mesa Zink driver
https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/zink.html
> Can you provide a reference for this?
The last OpenGL release 4.6 was in 2017... I think that speaks for itself ;)
And at least on macOS, OpenGL is officially deprecated, stuck at 4.1 and is also quickly rotting (despite running on top of Metal now - but I don't think anybody at Apple is doing serious maintenance work on their OpenGL implementation).
That's not "OpenGL is officially deprecated".
In the end, if nobody is maintaining the OpenGL standard, implementations and tooling it doesn't matter much whether it is officially deprecated or just abandondend.
.. but people ARE maintaining the implementations and tooling even if the spec might not be getting new features aside from extensions. There's a difference.
Look at Mesa release notes for example, there's a steady stream of driver feature work and bugfixes for GL: https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/25.2.0.html (search for "gl_")
A slow moving graphics API is a good thing for many uses.
People are writing new OpenGL code all the time. See eg HN story sumbmissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> A slow moving graphics API is a good thing for many uses.
It's not slow moving. It's completely frozen. The Mesa guys are the only ones actually fixing bugs and improving implementations, but the spec is completely frozen and unmaintained. Apple, Microsoft and Google don't really care if OpenGL works well on their platforms.
> the spec is completely frozen and unmaintained.
but, literally this article is about something new that was added to the OpenGL spec
Well, not really to the OpenGL spec itself. It's about a new OpenGL extension being added to the extension registry. Vendors may implement it if they wish. AFAIK the core OpenGL spec hasn't been updated in years, so even though new extensions keep getting developed by vendors, the official baseline hasn't moved.
I suppose the same is true of Direct3D 11, though. Only the Direct3D 12 spec has been updated in years from what I can tell. (I'm not a graphics programmer.)
A main reason to do new OpenGL releases was to roll developed extensions to required features of a new OpenGL version to give application programmers a cohesive target platform. The pace of API extensions has slowed down enough that it's not going to be a problem for a while.
> but I don't think anybody at Apple is doing serious maintenance work on their OpenGL implementation
In other words nothing changed. The OpengGL standard had been well past 4.1 for years when Apple released Metal. People working with various 3D tools had to disable system integrity checks to install working drivers from NVIDIA to replace whatever Apple shipped by default.
I've never been able to successfully create a GL context > version 2.1, or invoke the GLSL compiler.
As a sidenote, I've very much enjoyed your blog, and developed a similar handle system as yours around the same time. Mine uses 32 bits though - 15 for index, 1 for misc stuff, 8 for random key, and 8 for object type :^)
Recent versions of macOS will provide either an OpenGL 2.1 context or OpenGL 4.1 context, depending on how you request the context. You have to request a 3.2+ core profile, and not use X11 or the glX* functions.
From macOS 10.7 to 10.9, you'd get an OpenGL 3.2 context. As OpenGL 4.1 is backward compatible to OpenGL 3.2, it's fine that the same code gets OpenGL 4.1 now.
Basically, macOS will provide an "old" API to programs that need it, which is fixed at 2.1, and a "modern" API to programs that know how to ask for it, which has settled at 4.1 and is unlikely to change.
OpenGL 4.1 is harmonised with OpenGL ES 2.0. Almost the same rendering model, features, extensions, etc. On iOS, iPadOS etc you can use OpenGL ES 2.0, and no version of OpenGL (non-ES), so my guess is that's why macOS settled on OpenGL 4.1. Both platforms offer the same OpenGL rendering features, but through slightly different APIs.
But if you request 4.1 over GLX (which uses X11/Xorg/XQuartz), the X11 code only supports OpenGL 2.1. For example, if you're porting some Linux code or other GLX examples over.
Unfortunately, the GLX limitation is probably just due to the Xorg-based XQuartz being open source but only minimally maintained since before OpenGL 3.2 was added to macOS. XQuartz uses Xorg and Mesa, which have all the bindings for 4.1, but some of them are not quite wired up.
The universal narrative around OpenGL is that it's deprecated, so I assumed that came with a thumbs-up from Khronos. In any case, I'm not holding my breath for GL > 4.6.