As Dota has grown and expanded over the years, so has the technology that powers it—both hardware and software. In order to keep the game and the Source 2 engine fresh, we’re planning on removing support for some older systems and configurations. Nothing is changing today, but in the coming months we’ll implement the following changes:
Remove support for Dota on 32-bit systems. You will need to have a 64-bit machine and OS to run Dota.
Remove support for macOS versions below 10.14.
Remove support for DirectX 9. Customers using DirectX 9 will instead switch to DirectX 11.
Remove support for OpenGL. Customers using OpenGL will instead switch to Vulkan.
Remove support for XAudio (-xaudio) and switch to using SDL Audio (-sdlaudio).
So, Steam is removing support for OpenGL and 32-bit OS’s for Dota 2.
I assume this change will carry over to other Steam games later on.
Does this mean that OpenGL will deprecate in the coming years ahead?
“Steam” is removing nothing. Valve, the company that owns Steam (which is just a store for programs, typically games), is removing OpenGL from one of the games they make: DOTA.
That’s it. That’s the message. It’s nothing more than that: one game is losing OpenGL support.
And yes, it is inevitable that, over time, programs will ditch support for, or not implement support for, OpenGL. Given that it’s been six years since Vulkan launched, this is not surprising.
OpenGL was never going to be supported indefinitely. Even NVIDIA hasn’t tried to bring their ray-tracing functionality to GL. They told their customers that, if they really need ray tracing support in a GL app… just use OpenGL/Vulkan interop, where you do the ray tracing in Vulkan, and use the resulting data for the rest of your GL stuff.
