[adamisntdead]

As someone who read this with an editor full of OpenCL kernels, I think apple must really have missed the point of these sort of frameworks - heterogeneous computing.

If I wanted the best possible speed, latest features ect. I would write multiple back ends in things like CUDA.

I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

:/

[w-m]

> I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

That was the promise, but it never became reality. When writing kernels for real-world applications, OpenCL breaks down in numerous ways. The result is usually neither stable, nor portable, nor fast and a pain to work with. There was never OpenCL support for 3rd party developers on iOS.

You say you are writing OpenCL kernels on a MBP and they are portable, maybe you got lucky? Lots of comments I see on the deprecation on OpenCL seem to come from people who like the idea of having OpenCL (and its promises, which are awesome), but never had the awful experience of actually working with it.

I remember the open letter from the Blender developers on the sad state of OpenCL support on Mac (http://preta3d.com/os-x-users-unite/) from 2015. Some GPU vendors (AMD, Intel and Qualcomm) continued to put resources to better OpenCL support over the last couple years, but maybe too little, too late? It seems at least Apple had already given up on OpenCL by the time of this letter (and moved their resources completely to Metal), as nothing new has happened for OpenCL since then.

I'd prefer if we had a working OpenCL on many platforms. As we don't, especially not on Apple platforms, the step of deprecating it is regrettable, but at least honest.

[Lio]

I know that Apple is commercial organisation and not a charity but projects like Blender bring a lot to the platform.

It would be great to find out later that Apple had reached out to the Blender dev team with a strategy on how to move to either Metal or a Vulcan/Metal adaptor.

Personally I was thinking about getting an eGPU just for Blender use. It would be a shame to have to leave macOS just to run Blender.

[Athas]

Agreed, I am in a similar situation. This is very sad. Also, while OpenCL is a bit verbose to interact with directly, Vulkan compute shaders are much much worse. I realise that at some point I will have to start using it, but I'm not looking forward it.

[ksk]

>because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

I'm not an OpenCL programmer by trade, but I have dabbled in it (Wrote an AES decrypter in OpenCL) and I have never found this proposition to be true.