Official OpenGL Deprecation and Removal for macOS and Windows

Greetings from the graphics platforms team!

With the release of macOS Mojave 10.14, Apple discontinued official support for OpenGL (core), and a Metal support GPU is a system requirement.

As a result, we will officially deprecate the OpenGL graphics API for macOS platforms in the 22.2 release, and Unity 2022.2’s system requirements increase the minimum required macOS version to 10.14 for both the Editor and the Player. We are going to remove OpenGL support for macOS entirely in Unity 2023.1.

Removal of the OpenGL backend will reduce our developers' maintenance overhead, allowing us to spend more time on meaningful improvements to performance and stability, as well as new features. With this in mind, we are now evaluating the deprecation and removal of OpenGL support for Windows platforms.

Our existing analytics indicate that the absolute majority of Windows editors and players are targeting DirectX and are also capable of supporting the Vulkan graphics API as a reliable alternative. However, to ensure no negative impact on users, we are also investigating and evaluating all possible dependencies on OpenGL (such as native plugin usage).

To better understand your needs in regards to OpenGL support, we would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to fill out the following survey: OpenGL Deprecation and Removal for Desktop Platforms.

We will continue to maintain support for the OpenGL graphics backend for Linux in the foreseeable future as we monitor the state of Vulkan support and utilization for the Linux Editor and Player.

Your feedback is essential - so if you are currently targeting OpenGL, please let us know your use cases and share any insights you would like us to consider moving forward!

 

Please keep in mind that this doesn't guarantee anything. The real devices are backed by different GPUs, drivers and shader compilers, and the way editor works is very different from the player.