Re:Blender 2.80
by valine on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @01:36PM
(#20567148)
Or, you know, if Apple put the smallest amount of effort into maintaining their OpenGL drivers. Why should Blender have to maintain multiple implementations of their renderer? Even if Apple supported it financially, having multiple implementations of Eevee would add development complexity and make it harder for the community to contribute features.
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OpenGL isn't used for high quality ray tracing like you'd need for a 3D modeling tool like Blender unless you want to get hacky. The proper way to do it is with something like OpenCL or Cuda. Vulkan and Metal support compute shaders too.
Apple abandoning OpenGL sucks a lot, but them not supporting Vulkan is much worse.
Eevee is the real-time viewport renderer and uses OpenGL. Blender's path tracer is implemented with Cuda and OpenCL. Also OpenGL supports compute shaders FYI.
OpenGL 4.3 (Aug. 2012) also supports compute shaders. Apple just never updated beyond OpenGL 4.1 (Jul. 2010).
Re:Blender 2.80
by indolering on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @01:50AM
(#20571980)
It's such stupid technical debt, they just aren't going to get lock-in from it like Microsoft did from DirectX. Sure, it was ready before Vulkan was, but the cost of rewriting whatever investments they have made in Metal must be outweighed by the long term maintenance costs. ugh
> if Apple put the smallest amount of effort into maintaining their OpenGL drivers
They ditched OpenGL? how does that work?
Apple has deprecated OpenGL on all its devices: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-opengl...
Noob question: There's a way to write a OpenGL drive that uses Metal underneath?
The same company which originally built MoltenVK built MoltenGL for specifically this purpose.
Awesome! Maybe some company like that could offer their driver for free to blender community, as a marketing strategy. I believe that even have some space to a sector giant (like autodesk) acquire this type of company.
It's probably possible yes.
I don't know if one already exist for OpenGL, but for Vulkan there's MoltenVK: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK