Conformant OpenGL® ES 3.1 drivers are now available for M1- and M2-family GPUs. That means the drivers are compatible with any OpenGL ES 3.1 application.
Our reverse-engineered, free and open source graphics drivers are the world’s only conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for M1- and M2-family graphics hardware. That means our driver passed tens of thousands of tests to demonstrate correctness and is now recognized by the industry.
Why did we pursue standards conformance when the manufacturer did not? Above all, our commitment to quality. We want our users to know that they can depend on our Linux drivers. We want standard software to run without M1-specific hacks or porting.
I would love to see Apple go down the route of actually supporting modern OpenGL and Vulkan on their hardware. The hardware is amazing but forcing software to rely on Metal just holding it back especially when it comes to games.
Well, they sort of support Vulkan via a translation layer called MoltenVK. This is how the Dolphin emulator was able to get GameCube games running on M1, for example.
That’s probably the most that Mac users will get, unfortunately - the only games that Apple will care about are the ones exclusive to their Apple Arcade service, which will therefore use the Metal API anyway…
I hope they do not. I wish they stay stupidly stubborn until it’s too late.
Because people treat apple as if it’s the pinnacle of design, performance, and usability. People who want to game on their hardware should have it so hard that they will take anything they can to make that possible on that hardware. If Linux becomes that thing that makes it all possible, so much so that it becomes common knowledge “if you want to game on a mac, install linux”, then finally some fruit worshippers could possibly see what surrounds them instead of their myopic view of their fruit god.
Mac missed the gaming train two decades ago.
It’s never too late for a corporation of their size to wake up one day and decide “well, now there’s some kind of a reason to make gaming on mac possible”. I can only hope that if they’re pushed to that, that linux is so far ahead that it becomes difficult to get back their followers. If by some miracle Valve decides to invest in making linux work on mac, there would be two giants in the game.
But only time will tell…
