I don't know much about OpenGL, but I hear that things have gotten better with 3.2 and I saw several headlines screaming that 4.0 will be competitive with DX11, but that's not the point of the topic I'm trying to make. Valve announced Steam for OSX (and Phoronix keeps on finding "evidence" that a Linux client is in the works). Is the OpenGL/OpenCL progress finally pushing them to port Steam and possibly some of their games to OSX and possibly Linux? Could other games get ported to OSX as well? (I'm looking at you, Unreal Tournament 3!)

While it is possible, I would think the move is mostly to gain that extra 10% market share, as I understand it, the gold engine (HL1) does optionally run using an OpenGL renderer, source probably does too unless they let that code rot, but they could get it back on track if they wanted to.

The server already runs on Linux, and there are Xbox versions, so I'd think a lot of the code is already cross platform.

one can hope. UT3 was a total flop, you can barely get a game online.

Quote: Original post by Drunken_Monkey
I don't know much about OpenGL, but I hear that things have gotten better with 3.2 and I saw several headlines screaming that 4.0 will be competitive with DX11, but that's not the point of the topic I'm trying to make.

Valve announced Steam for OSX (and Phoronix keeps on finding "evidence" that a Linux client is in the works). Is the OpenGL/OpenCL progress finally pushing them to port Steam and possibly some of their games to OSX and possibly Linux? Could other games get ported to OSX as well? (I'm looking at you, Unreal Tournament 3!)

OpenGL 4.0 is supposed to support the same hardware features as DX11, that by itself doesn't make it competetive though, (hardware features have always been available through extensions anyway), the real problem with OpenGL in the last years have been that it has been more time consuming to develop for it.

This is partially due to extensions being a bit of a pain since different vendors use different extensions (OpenGL 4.0 solves this by moving alot more into the baseline API), but a large part is also due to DX having a far better utility library( the difference between D3Dx and glu is huge) and a similar API for Sound etc.

OpenGL improving is probably not the reason, the push towards OS X would have happened anyway (DX10 level functionality has been available in OSX through extensions for pretty much the same amount of time as DX10 has provided it for Windows). (Its really all about marketshare, Apple is hovering around 10% on the US market i think and thats quite alot)

a Linux steam client might be a possibility but it doesn't really mean that Valve will port their own games, they might just be thinking about selling games that are allready available for Linux.

1)

Quote: Your Mac Questions Answered
Yesterday, we announced that Steam and all our Source engine games will be coming to the Mac.

2)Evidence Suggests Steam is Coming to Linux

Quote: Original post by Kambiz

Quote: Your Mac Questions Answered
Yesterday, we announced that Steam and all our Source engine games will be coming to the Mac.

Nice , and mac users who allready own the Windows versions of valves games won't have to buy them again, thats pretty darn awesome these days.

[Edited by - SimonForsman on May 4, 2010 4:18:54 PM]

Blizzard also supports OpenGL. Most of their games are Mac friendly.

Don't forget id software, their engine was always OpenGL based and cross platform. According to Wikipedia, Unreal engine also support both Linux and Mac.
We will probably see a lot of cross platform games in near future.

IMHO, the real news here is not that Valve's Source-powered games will be available on Mac, but that Steam as a platform is. This gives all kinds of people an easy marketplace on Osx.

Now, if Apple would just release a consumer level machine with a decent graphics card....

Quote: Original post by Kambiz
According to Wikipedia, Unreal engine also support both Linux and Mac.

Epic has dropped support for Linux with UT3 in practice by turning the Linux client into vaporware, they do have Linux Servers though. My wishful thinking is that part of the UT3 flop is because of the backlash from Linux users (I won't buy until the client is available), but it is more likely that because of the flop, the Linux client is scraped indefinitely delayed.