Apple pushes devs to adopt Metal as it deprecates MacOS OpenGL support

During its WWDC event in San Jose today Apple debuted a new version of its MacOS, 10.14 (aka "Mojave"), with deprecated support for both OpenGL and OpenCL. While apps that use either open standard will still run on Mojave, neither will be actively supported by Apple going forward. 

The big deal here is that the company is encouraging devs to update their MacOS games to use Apple's own Metal (the current iteration is dubbed "Metal 2") graphics tech, rather than OpenGL's actual successor Vulkan.

"Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal," reads an Apple dev guide to what's new with Mojave. "Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders."

Like OpenGL and OpenCL (and unlike Metal), Vulkan is an open standard cross-platform graphics API maintained by The Khronos Group; unlike OpenGL and OpenCL, Vulkan has seen no official support from Apple, which seems to be focused on getting devs to use its own proprietary graphics tech.

That said, earlier this year folks at Khronos worked with other devs to release tools that enable Vulkan support on iOS and MacOS. For more deals on that effort, check out The Khronos Group's Portability Initiative hub.