Prince McLean Also Gives Me Brain Ache

Spews forth he:

“The broad industry support Apple is building around OpenCL will help increase the critical mass behind OpenGL, the 2D and 3D graphics language Apple uses extensively in Mac OS X.”

What follows doesn’t make much sense, and fails to even make good on the teaser paragraph’s promise. What we have here is basically another anti-Microsoft screed, with Prince banging on about how their DirectX is proprietary and designed with the sole purpose of perpetuating the Windows monopoly. Which would be fine, except that DirectX is a far broader product than OpenGL, which frankly makes it better at doing what its target audience needs. DirectX isn’t just a graphics API like OpenGL, but also includes sound and input management. OpenAL is available to sort-of do the same thing cross-platform on the audio front, but there’s really nothing to compare with the input side of things. Apple almost did have once, in the shape of Game Sprockets, but that’s long dead. When you hear people saying that Apple doesn’t support games developers, it’s this kind of lack of support for the basics which they’re talking about.

As for OpenGL, as Prince himself writes, every current computing or console platform — including Windows — supports it. I think I’m correct in saying that ‘everybody’ equals a critical mass. Some developers of Windows games even prefer to use it to DirectX, showing that there isn’t any Microsoft lock-in. (I know Id used to, although I’m not sure if they still do.)

All of which is besides the point, since OpenGL really has very little to do with OpenCL. Yes, they share 5 letters, involve GPUs and sound almost identical, but that’s the extent of it. OpenGL is about rendering graphics, while OpenCL is about using the phenomenal power of the GPU for general computations when they’re not rendering graphics. I haven’t read through the OpenCL specs yet so I couldn’t tell you whether it’s possible to run GL and CL code concurrently, but I doubt you’d want to even if you could.

‘Prince McLean’ is exactly the sort of illogical fanboi who gives the rest of us a bad name.

• Apple Insider