While some big developers might find it worth the investment to use metal, most of us won't. When you're already invested in OpenGL and you're a cross-platform developer, Metal is not even open for consideration. Vulkan maybe, once it's more established.
What I would really benefit from is updated OpenGL support. Right now, MacOS X is the lowest common denominator, with all the other platforms having 4.5+ as standard. I can upgrade to that with ease. But I'm never going to be able to justify rewriting the stuff with Metal, because it would mean a complete parallel implementation just for MacOS, since we would need to retain OpenGL everywhere else.
Vendor-specific graphics APIs are, for the most part, a legacy of the past which we were lucky to escape from. Apple creating Metal is an anachronism, and I don't think it will have a long life unless they make it portable.
That won't help those who don't have resources to add support for a redundant API, and would rather leave MacOS without some features than do the former.
> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.
That phrase is confusing. They can use core profile, but Apple is simply stuck on older OpenGL, so features they rely on to implement DX11 aren't available on MacOS. So if Apple would have provided full OpenGL 4.5+ support, it wouldn't have been an issue.
I've not heard of any games or VR software released to the market that use Metal yet. I've heard it mentioned about projects still in development but so far that's all.
Both Unity and Unreal Engine (UE4) supports Metal, so any games created in Unity/UE4 for Mac & iOS might possibly use it. If the game doesn't need anything beyond GL 3 support then the creator might choose to not enable Metal and stick with GL.
I don't know what percentage of Unity/UE4 Mac & iOS games have Metal enabled, but it is potentially a very large number.
That's the thing about Metal -- as long as common libraries and game engines add support for it, most developers won't have to do much additional work to use it. Only people who are writing their own graphics engine from scratch would need to learn it.
Not everyone is going to spend resources on implementing a redundant API. Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks by not supporting OpenGL and Vulkan.
