Does every Mac with Lion support OpenGL 3.2?

Question

I'm writing a mac application that draws some of its UI on NSOpenGLView using OpenGL with legacy profile.

My app is targeted to OS X 10.7 and later.

If I migrate to OpenGL 3.2, would it prevent some users with Lion to run it, or every Mac with Lion supports OpenGL 3.2 anyway?

Boley

Answer 1

OS X 10.7's SDK includes OpenGL 3.2's Core profile, but actual run-time support requires the presence of an OpenGL 3.2-compliant GPU and driver.

OpenGL 3.2 was released in 2008 and OS X 10.7 Lion supports certain Mac models going back to 2006. The Late 2006 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro runs Lion and has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 which is an OpenGL 2.0 GPU.

By that single example it is shown that the set of computers capable of running 10.7 Lion is a superset of the set of computers capable of running OpenGL 3.2 programs.

Note that I'm neither a Mac expert nor an OpenGL programmer, I don't know to what extent OpenGL is backwards compatible. I guess compiling against OpenGL 3.2 libraries is fine, but if you try to use any hardware-accelerate 3.2 features then you'd get a runtime error. But then you should test to see if a feature is supported before using it, so your program should run fine on older Macs provided you make some minor modifications.

Hospital

Answer 2

OSX has a software fallback renderer which is automatically used whenever an OpenGL feature is not available in hardware. Every OSX machine running Lion supports the full OpenGL 3.2 Core specification via this software fallback renderer. If you request features that aren't available in hardware, then the OpenGL framework will silently fall back to software rendering for that stage of the graphics pipeline.

This means that every single Mac running Lion will run your OpenGL 3.2 application, regardless of hardware. You will not get a runtime error, but you may or may not get acceptable performance -- depending on what features the GPU supports in hardware and how complex your rendering task is.

Mariner

Answer 3

therefromhere's answer is correct, if you disable the software renderer fallback option which is available for every Mac that runs Lion, but is not hardware accelerated.

Here is a detailed list of OpenGL features supported by different GPUs and the system software renderer: https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_1075_Core.html

Boley