Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 Mojave

Apple has announced the deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL! Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will still work in macOS 10.14 Mojave, but this is the beginning of a grace period for transitioning from those two APIs and to newer and more modern replacements. Deprecated APIs may be removed entirely from a future version of the operating system. This is sad, but not really a surprise since a number of our developer friends have told us that Apple unofficially deprecated OpenGL for years by not updating it. You can see this doc for the details yourself. Metal is faster, cleaner and more modern, but what GPU will Apple be using in the future and where does this leave gamers?

“Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques.”