Minecraft not using the latest OpenGL that is installed on the Mac

Minecraft does not use features from the most recent OpenGL versions currently, as older hardware is still supported. In future releases the game may begin to use newer OpenGL features.

I'm confused, Minecraft for Windows uses OpenGL 4.5? The newer versions of OpenGL are not just about features but also about better performance eg framerate.

Minecraft does not use OpenGL 4.5. It has a minimum requirement of OpenGL 1.2. Newer OpenGL features are used when available by the graphics drivers, such as the following:

1.3 Multitexturing
1.5 VBOs
2.1 Shaders
3.0 Framebuffer objects

Simply slapping on a higher version number doesn't magically improve performance. You actually have to program for it, by using newer OpenGL features.

So you start out by saying "Newer OpenGL features are used when available by the graphics drivers" followed by "slapping on a higher version number doesn't magically improve performance".

The issue here is that Minecraft for macOS is stuck on opengl 2.1 while my machine can run opengl 4.5. This machine is triple booted with Mac, Linux and Windows. On both Windows and Linux I get opengl 4.5 yet on macOS its stuck on 2.1.

To me that makes this a bug, software that runs on 3 platforms but is lacking features on only 1 of them.

As I previously mentioned, the game uses features when they are made available through the installed graphics drivers. I comes to me as no surprise that the drivers installed on Linux and Windows provide newer OpenGL feature sets than macOS, seeing as Apple is responsible for providing drivers in that case. I am curious though, since you mention that your system (on macOS) has "OpenGL 4.1 installed", where this information is provided, leading to this discrepancy. I am in no way doubting that your system has the capabilities; I just want to be certain it is installed as you describe.

On a separate note, the game itself is not directly responsible for handling rendering, as this is achieved through the libraries it uses (such as LWJGL). It may be possible that the library version the game bundles has some sort of bug, preventing it from utilizing newer OpenGL features on macOS/OSX. It could equally be possible that the libraries are not able to properly interface with the GPU due to an issue with the driver implementation (though I doubt this). I am however no expert on LWJGL so this is entirely speculation. The developers have been working on updates to the backend, updating the minimum java version requirement and thus updating some libraries. Perhaps try with the latest snapshot (currently 17w15a), see if that makes a difference. The full release of 1.12 could also see more updates such as these once it's released.

This needs to be fixed now. with the 1.14.3 snapshot there's a warning that the game will not work in the futrue. My GPU supports 4.1 but it stll starts the game on 2.1 mode.

@unknown, you've commented on a 3 year old ticket, and in the future I would recommend creating new tickets instead. Also, I haven't seen OSX/MacOS support Nvidia graphics cards in many years, so it wouldn't come as a surprise to me if the operating system was messing with the supported version, or not correctly updating the drivers for it. That said, assuming the tool you are using is correctly reporting the installed GPU drivers, this may merit creating a new ticket, or a discussion on the Mojira subreddit.

Your issue is MC-153714.

It's crazy to see answers from CubeTheThird.

So problem stay the same since the opening of the ticket, why it's marked as solved?

In fact there is 2 profile in macOS core (include 4.1 opengl) and compat (include 2.1 opengl).

The problem is core profile isn't really fully backward compatibility with 2.1

the issue can be solved by forcing the usage of core profile in the startup script of the launcher.

Best regards.

@unknown, if you have information to add, I recommend you provide it on MC-153714. That being said, it seems the information you describe is already known to the developers.