The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality

Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by overgard on Monday May 12, 2014 @03:42PM (#7734969)

Not a vendor per se, but since they pretty much prevent you from installing any updated drivers I'll also say: Apple's OpenGL support is horrid. Like, buggy, entirely behind the times, incredibly slow. I tend to reboot my mac into windows whenever I need to do actual graphics coding, which is a shame.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by wlesieutre on Monday May 12, 2014 @08:43PM (#7736132)

A friend of mine was working on a cross platform OpenGL project and wanted to use some OpenGL extension that was originally proposed by a couple of people from Apple and somebody at Nvidia.

You would assume that having proposed it, Apple would have implemented it. Nope. Windows only.

Apple advertises their support for OpenGL 4 in Mac OS 10.9, but they're only up to 4.1. That's the version of the spec from 2010. No tessellation or compute shaders, among other things that were added in 4.2, 4.3, or 4.4. In particular, 4.3 would be a big step because of parity with OpenGL ES 3.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by mattst88 on Monday May 12, 2014 @09:17PM (#7736211)

Tessellation shaders were a part of GL 4.0. See https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilit...

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by wlesieutre on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @08:02AM (#7743236)

Ah, you're right. Still, compute shaders are a pretty big deal to be missing, especially for offloading calculations like particle systems and realtime global illumination to the GPU.

10.10 announcements should be starting up in not too long, so maybe we'll see improvements.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by ekianjo on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @12:45AM (#7736610)

> Apple's OpenGL support is horrid.

Funny, they still do get a lot more game ports than Linux so far (while Linux is progressively getting there).

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by maccard on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @07:37AM (#7737580)

larger (proven) market share is my guess. I have no stats on that by the way, it's a pure guess. The closest thing I ahve is I looked at the humble bundle stats, and scrolled down to the first games bundle which is : http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/attachments/...

Looking at the graph, I can't differenciate between mac and linux on it, but the next one (humble indie bundle 9): http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/attachments/...

the mac purchases are more substantial than the linux ones. This could be due to any number of factors, but like I said, it's only a guess.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by overgard on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @11:30AM (#7738606)

Well, sure, but I don't see what that proves. Game developers find a lot of hacks to work around bad software if there's a market.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by ekianjo on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @08:42PM (#7741535)

Well, I see a lot of developers bitching about how hard it is to port stuff for Linux, but I don't recall so much bad mouthing when it came to porting stuff for Mac in the first place.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by Freaky on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @02:53PM (#7745481)

A friend of mine works on ports for both platforms, and he vastly prefers the graphics driver situation on Linux, both in terms of driver quality and vendor support.

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Re:The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality by gcb0 on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @01:22AM (#7736678)

By your logic you'd buy a pinto instead of a Ferrari or a model S

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