The HD 7970 in OSX
The first beta of OSX 10.8.3 is available with the support of AMD Radeon HD 7900 series (based on the Tahiti XT GPU). Hummm… time machine please… the first HD 7900 has been launched one year ago. Currently, the latest supported Radeon belong to the HD 6000 series (6630/6750/6770/6970).
Maybe the support of HD 7000 series announces the coming of OpenGL 4 in OSX. Now that NVIDIA Kepler and AMD Tahiti GPUs are in OSX, it’s time to bring the latest version of OpenGL to Mac users! But maybe Apple plans to fully expose OpenGL 3.3 before, leaving OpenGL 4 for next year in OSX 10.9 or for the launch of a new Mac Pro… Wait and see.
Anyone know what is maximal version of OpenGL that ALL OSX devices can support?
AMD is just working on an Apple FAQ
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/APPLEFAQ.aspx
Stefan, do you have the login of the Apple FAQ?
No, but i guess it will be public soon.
I found from this link
http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx
>>Anyone know what is maximal version of OpenGL that ALL OSX devices can support?
OpenGL 3.2
https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/
Not much in the FAQ, basically saying AMD does not sell GPUs for Macs anymore. Have to get them from Apple.
przemoli: currently all new Macs support OpenGL 3.2 but nothing higher.
It surprises me a bit to see Tahiti support as all newer Macs now have NVidia or Intel and as Apple writes the drivers themselves (a reason for the bad support), selling Macs with GPUs from more vendors justs increases the workload for the driver team. The new MacPros jould as well use Kepler based cards (as the Retina MBP already uses Kepler).
Apple does NOT write the drivers themselves. This is a common misconception.
All vender drivers work as plugins on OSX, which is why NVIDIA sometimes releases updated drivers on their website, before they get rolled into one of the official Apple updates.
Updating the GLSL support for their front-end is probably a limiting factor in supporting new OpenGL versions and is probably a little risky to do in a point update. 10.5 Leopard introduced OpenGL 2.1 while 10.6 Snow Leopard expanded it to be OpenGL 2.1 + all OpenGL 3.0 extensions except GLSL 1.30 support. As such, since 10.7 Lion introduced OpenGL 3.2 support, perhaps 10.8 Mountain will get OpenGL 3.2 + all OpenGL 3.3 extensions except GLGL 3.3. OpenGL 4.x would then be introduced in 10.9. Hopefully OpenGL 4.3 due to the integration of compute shaders, but OpenGL 4.2 seems more likely.