Apple has taken the first steps to eliminate OpenGL and OpenCL in Mojave in favor of its own Metal technology.
Buried in the developer’s documentation section, Apple says it is beginning a “grace period” to stop using older technologies and, in this case, graphics technologies.
Of the older graphics technologies, Apple says that:
Applications created with OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run on macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are obsolete on macOS 10.14. Graphics-intensive games and applications that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, applications 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 modern GPUs on iOS, macOS and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overload inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing features. Unified support for graphics and metal computing enables your applications to efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques.
Given the news, it’s only a matter of time before older applications using these technologies stop working, but will continue to work for at least a year without updates. Apple also says that active development has stopped on OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac, and the API will only have “minor changes” in the future.
Change comes as no surprise. The OpenGL version in macOS High Sierra has stalled in the 3.3 version that was released in 2010. The current version of OpenGL is version 4.6, released in 2017.
The Kronos Group maintains the OpenGL standard. In February, the Khronos group launched open source tools that allow Vulkan, a 3D graphics API, to work on iOS and macOS.
The goal was to make it easier for developers to transfer games to Apple hardware from other platforms while leveraging technologies such as the Apple Metal Graphics API. However, it is not clear where the effort stands at this time, given the future removal of OpenGL.
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