Hi everyone. As we know, OpenGL is now deprecated on MacOS and iOS, and it is recommended for developers to use Metal. But the problem is - it requires a modern hardware. There are two quite obvious ways to use it - a real Mac and Hackintosh. But the question is - are there some ways to run Metal on virtual machine? I used VMware for testing OpenGL on MacOS, the video card on virtual machine supports OpenGL 2, and it is enough for making the game engine cross-platform, since the main issue is creating window, handling events and so on, and not modern features of OpenGL. But for Metal it's definitely not enough, even to run the simple application with a polygon. And it seems that VMware is not capable of using a real video card to render. It's probably possible to build Metal application on virtual machine and then test with a friend who has real Mac, but that's way too slow and inconvenient for both 
Maybe someone has any ideas or even experience with Metal on virtual machine.
Metal without Mac
Rather than supporting Metal directly, from the other thread on APIs some possibilities to investigate might be MoltenGL, MoltenVK, or an intermediate layer such as BGFX.
Yeah, as nice as Metal is (and IMO it's by far the friendliest of the next-gen graphics APIs), if you aren't bought into the Mac ecosystem, you are probably better off sticking to something a little more portable. i.e. Vulkan and test with MoltenVK when you have access to a Mac.
Well, actually, we should not worry about port for MacOS, OpenGL will work there probably for many years, and if not, there are MoltenGL and MoltenVK. But what if one has intention to learn Metal as it is and doesn't have Mac?
11 minutes ago, Vladimir128 said:But what if one has intention to learn Metal as it is and doesn't have Mac?
Buy a Mac
If you end up working in software outside of the games industry, there's a pretty good chance you'll end up using a Mac anyway. They are pretty ubiquitous in web, mobile and enterprise (I'd say around 3/4 of the engineers I've worked with at both Amazon and Facebook use Macs as their primary machine).
I triple boot Ubuntu/win10/osx. Only booting osx for recompiling and testing. I wouldn't recommend a Mac. They're expensive, slow and soldered.
On 9/14/2018 at 5:38 PM, swiftcoder said:If you end up working in software outside of the games industry, there's a pretty good chance you'll end up using a Mac anyway. They are pretty ubiquitous in web, mobile and enterprise (I'd say around 3/4 of the engineers I've worked with at both Amazon and Facebook use Macs as their primary machine).
This depends on where someone is working. Macs are not as common (for developers) in some regions as they are in the US.
