then it no longer has an OpenGL implementation. But those were specific choices made by those platforms they didn't have to do it that way, and Apple did not.Īs such, if MacOS no longer contains an OpenGL implementation. It didn't have to do that it could have allowed the driver to expose whatever it wanted, which was done on other platforms. Those don't exist on MacOS, because MacOS controls what extensions are available. If you look at Windows or Linux OpenGL implementations, AMD and NVIDIA have loads of extensions they support. This is why on MacOS, the list of extensions supported by implementations lacks a lot of vendor-specific extensions. Graphics drivers on MacOS don't contain OpenGL implementations MacOS itself has an implementation, but part of it gets provided by graphics drivers. You never talk directly to the graphics driver MacOS always sits as the intermediary between you. Any results are translated from those internal driver APIs and forwarded back to you. The OS then translates that GL function call into an internal API implemented by graphics driver makers, which the OS then calls.

Your OpenGL function call goes into the operating system. When you talk to OpenGL on MacOS, first and foremost you are talking to MacOS. When it comes to interacting with hardware, userland code can interact with a driver exactly and only to the extent that the operating system allows it.

The OS defines a means of interacting with drivers of certain types, and makers of hardware for those types of things provide implementations of the driver APIs defined by the OS. Can't graphic card vendors like AMD just make their graphic driver for MacOS to support the later version of OpenGL?Ī 'driver' is a piece of code that is used by the operating system to communicate with some piece of hardware.

Mac os opengl support