macOS

Apple does not provide support for OpenGL past version 4.1 on macOS. Additionally, due to the closed-source nature of macOS, it is impossible to use third-party drivers. As a result, any feature implemented in OpenGL 4.2 or later is not available natively on macOS. Notable missing features include:

• compute shaders
• custom images
• SSBOs
• atomic counting

Additionally, in OptiFine, macOS only has access to 8 color textures. In Iris, macOS has access to all 16 buffers.

Workarounds

Here be dragons!

These workarounds are experimental, and as such, subject to crashes, bugs, and general instability. Iris is not designed with these workarounds in mind, and any Iris-specific bugs caused by them will likely never be fixed.

If you are on macOS and want to develop a shader that requires OpenGL 4.2+ exclusive features, there exist several possible ways to achieve this:

• Zink
• Whisky / GPTK
• Virtual Machines
  • Parallels Desktop
  • VMware Fusion
• Asahi Linux

These solutions have not been tested by the authors of these docs. You’re on your own!