Either way, it's a substantial imrpovement from Apple in based upon the driver support we saw in 10.7 and 10.8. For those running newer Macs with dedicated graphics cards, such as the recently updated iMacs and 15' MacBook Pro with Retina Display, we're not there yet as those cards can actually support up to OpenGL 4.3. The Mac OS now supports OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL 1.2.įor those of you running on Intel integrated graphics cards, all of your drivers are supported and up to date as even Intel's latest HD Graphics 5000 (as seen on the 2013 MacBook Air) and the Iris Pro 5200 (as seen on the latest MacBook Pro with Retina display) support OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL 1.2. With the launch of Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks today, we see significant updates in regards to OpenGL and OpenCL drivers. Slowly after the launch of Lion, I installed Boot Camp and stuck to playing my Valve games on Windows due to the lack of support and updates. Suffice to say, Counter-strike: Global Offensive and DOTA2 pale in comparison with their Windows counterparts.

Whereas in the past Valve was quick to fix these issues, it felt as if Valve was starting to withdraw support from the Mac OS. With the launch of 10.7 Lion in 2011 and 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012, which saw minimal upgrades for OpenGL and OpenCL, Valve's library started to suffer from significant performance drops and issues. Not as great as it would on Windows using DirectX, but still serviceable for those in the Mac world. Obviously, this was key in Valve's more recent support regarding Linux.Īt that time, games like Team Fortress 2 and the Left 4 Dead series ran just fine. When Steam was launched on the Mac in 2010, Valve rewrote most of their games using the native OpenGL and OpenCL drivers that Snow Leopard at that time supported. When Mac introduced OpenGL (3.0) and OpenCL (1.0) drivers in Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009, not many applications took advantage of it.

Mac os x mavericks opengl