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SGI Gives Open Source some OpenGL Love
Doctor Bob writes "Just saw this press release from SGI. I think this quote sums it up:
"With today's release, all of the necessary components to implement hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers will be available to the open source community."
" The implementation from SGI is ready for download from SGI. Have fun.
Re:Way to go SGI
(Score:0)
by slashdot-terminal on 9:47 26th January, 2000 MDT
(User Info) http://www.debian.org
God, I love SGI. I'm glad to see another big company actually put their source code where their mouth is. Sun are you listening?
May I ask why?
Hey nice I know let's bash slashdot-terminal because he makes a different point of view than most of us that's real nice. Yeah we really see consumers just flocking for machines that cost more than $5,000 US at the cheapest
hahahaha.
Frank, you're a dumb motherfucker !!!
If SGI wish to open-source their stuff, I'm happy. I think that's a good think, and I can heartily say "more power to 'em". Why do we scream for companies to open-source their stuff, then we have people like you who proceed to bitch about it when they do.
Also, it'd be a lot easier to understand your opinion on this if you wrote in better English. (I'm not gonna say anything about your intelligence - I have a professor who is quite intelligent from what I can tell, but most of the time people can't understand him for love or money...)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The availability of Open Inventor on Linux would make it much easier to build compelling 3D applications on that platform. Releasing it under an Open Source license would be killer! Please make it happen SGI. While you're at it, please do the same with the ImageVision Library .
"Yeah well
None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
:-). Sun are preparing to trek around it. So long, Sun, enjoy the trip, follow the footprints when you get back.
That seems to have been SGI's attitude all along, and I must say that it's far and away the best corporate attitude I've seen in any big player.
IBM is doing good, yes, but in a relatively cold-blooded way. In essence, SGI can't see the bottom of this chasm they've come to, but are willing to try jumping it anyway. That's real courage! IBM thinks that they can see the bottom, and are in for a surprise (-: IBM-shaped hole at bottom?
For SGI's multiple commitments to the public good (hey, that's me!), I'll be recommending SGI gear over comparable equipment from elsewhere for every high-end job that I spec from now on. It won't take a great percentage of the computing public doing likewise to double SGI's turnover.
Are you listening, Sun?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The funny thing is, SGI is smart. They know that if they help drive the Linux application market, they will reap the benefits: "Hey applications maker, let us help you port your Linux application to Irix."
This is actually a very insightful take on SGI's current strategy. By promoting Linux as "Irix Jr.", they keep some of the mindshare away from NT, and towards the traditional Unix vendors (which SGI knows how to compete with).
The question is: are people really moving towards NT because of hardware costs? Or is because NT is seen to integrate easier into a "regular" corporate network with "regular" support personnel? (I know that is one main reason Macs are on the out on most corporate networks.) Sure, the smart strategy is to be "developer-centric", but in the real world there are many pennywise-poundfoolish situations.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
My comment was on the sad fact that, in the last few cases of companies attempting to open up source of a particular piece of software, that this is in fact A Very Bad Thing when the software is not released under the GPL. This, in fact, has been encouraged in the past by Richard Stallman (although his position seems to have softened a bit; he actually seemed pretty positive about Qt.)
:^)
On the same token, I started using Linux around '96, and at the time, several of us realized that if we wanted corporate America, or our future bosses if you will, to take Linux seriously and consider it as something more than a hacker's toy, that we would have to persuade companies to release/port Linux versions of their software. Well, several of us have worked to do just that; and, with embarrassing regularity, these companies are flooded with emails berating the comanies for not opening the source of the program. This is an area where we should take small steps. We've been able to convince a *few* comanies to port what would be considered desktop-oriented products to what would ordinarily be considered a hacker-oriented/server-oriented operating system. To have them take on, at the same time, an entirely new development strategy would be considered by most to be a foolish business decision. I wish I could remember what company it was, or even what product it was, but I recall an interview with a developer working for a company that had just released a Linux version of their product. The developer made the point of saying, "Don't crucify us for not releasing the source," or something to that effect, stating that it was tough enough to get the pointy-haired management types to do a Linux port. There's a reason he said that.
And yes, I feel very strongly about the GPL, which is why I bristle every time someone suggests that every piece of software written *has* to be released under the GPL, and that any other license is crap. I personally like the GPL, but I certainly don't advocate GPLing everything. Hey, let's get Visa to GPL their CCN generator code
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Are you implying that Sun is doing the wrong thing for not being a consumer oriented business? Why would Sun even *want* consumers to use their products? That's not their business plan.
-BrentI don't know how you could consider it not open source; please read the license.
:D My initial (wrong) impression was that the "reference implementation" was just a driver, but it looks like you're giving us the whole enchilada. Good going guys.
...Dynamic assembly code generation for rasterization is not yet included, making software rendering performance slow.
:-) Obviously it's in their interest to throw their stuff into the pot if they want to sell cards to 10,000,000 penguinistas.
I misspoke, and I couldn't be more happy to be corrected
If you have questions about our licensing, please check the FAQ. It goes into a lot more detail.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
So it does:
What's missing from the current Sample Implementation?
That looks like a fun project. I assume this is the time honored hack of assembling code on the stack and branching to it, to cover all the lighting combinations without having 10,000 different inner loops.
The geometry path assembly code optimizations which we ship to our commercial licensees are actually owned by other companies, so we don't have the rights to place them under an open source license. We will work with the companies involved to try and free up these components.
Go get 'em
Thanks a bunch.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
>Linux will run on low cost, high powered >hardware. IRIX will (currently) only run on >expensive proprietary SGI boxes.
I can easily put together a set of requirements that would force a Linux-based system to cost more than the "equivalent" SGI box. Real-time image processing on a video stream is one example: an R5000 O2 can do a lot in that regime (for tiny money); I don't know how you'd build the Linux box to do the same thing (assuming PC components).
I appologize, I was speaking strictly from the view of someone who uses computers to create 2D and 3D art assets for both realtime and prerendered animations. For the work I do I can easily grab a bunch of off the shelf components (motherboard, 2 PIIIs or Athlons, GeForce Quadro, SCSI card, SCSI drive, etc...) and build a box that would have a lot of bang/buck under either Linux or NT. It will be a heck of a lot cheaper than an Oxygen and it will do the job just as well.
Did you figure in the cost of gigabit ethernet and the switches to go with it? I wouldn't even consider doing a large render on 100bt.
For more money you have one single box. Ask pixar why they used 14 sun boxes and not a fleet of cheap PC's.
Pixar used many more than 14 Sun boxes. And you know why they chose Sun boxes with slower processors? It wasn't $/cycle or anything as traditional as that. They used a measurement of cycles/square foot. Since those Sun boxes are flat they could get many many more of them in the space they had for their renderfarm. Mac, SGIs, Alpha, and Intel boxes were out because they couldn't get enough of them in the room.
But what Pixar does is -orders- of magnitude more complex than the work a team of 5 artists does for a computer game. So, no, I didn't figure in the cost of a bunch of networking equipment that wouldn't benefit us greatly.
For that great link you will be handsomely rewarded indeed.
BTW. What's with that Star Wars Episode II poster there?! Huh? Is it correct??
Seti doesn't even come close to using the FPU to the extent that a 3D rendering program will. Using Seti as some sort of contrived benchmark for -anything- is ridiculous in the extreme.
Sure one MIPS processor of a given mHz might outperform the same PIII at the same speed, but for the same money I can get a room full of PIIIs and have a very fast renderfarm. So what if an SGI can do 1 frame faster than my PIII. With the distributed renderfarm at the same $ I can have the entire animation done much much faster.
Plus I don't have to have yearly maintenance contracts for hardware and overpriced software that make the TCO of the machine much larger than it should be.
Thanks for explaining to the slashdolts how vertical market software is sold. People here tend to assume that since their e-mail campaign against Soundblaster (etc) worked, that sort of advocacy will work anywhere.
I'm not going to go into the issue of the rating system here at slashdot. I don't really care what they rated my post. in fact, I didn't post to get a rating - I simply posted just to share my views of how I saw things from the inside.
ok - you have more years at sgi than I do. great. have you not read the .ba postings while you were there? or, were we reading different .ba groups?? the one that _I_ read had lots of disgust/mistrust toward management. when they effectively cut MIPS loose there was sore feelings all around. but they DID cut it loose, for all practical purposes. in fact, when I was on the first floor and they were on the 2nd, you needed a special keycard to get into their space and vice versa. that is a SURE sign that the two had parted company. they had their own network, mostly separate from ours, etc, etc.
for the record, I have nothing bad to say about the MIPS technology, let me make that very clear. I loved their chips and designs. but business-wise, sgi and mips were just not meant to be with each other for the long run. "IA64 this and IA64 that, and microsoft for the other" was all I heard. "dump IRIX from the desktop and replace the whole shooting match with NT". we were staffing up to train our ops guys in NT and were de-emphasizing IRIX on the desktop big-time. I saw this first-hand - this wasn't just a rumor.
if you've been at sgi as long as you have, surely you know that their business direction (in the last few years) changes like the wind. so there's no basis in betting the farm on what they are currently preaching.
as to your comment 2 years at SGI doesn't give everyone insight into it's future, my reply is: how long does it take to see that staying there was a losing proposition? about 3/4 of the folks I knew when I was there had all left. perhaps even the top 3/4 of the company, talen-wise, if I may be so bold...
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
i missed it??
If you don't like the patent infringment-stories. :)
Turn them off
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This is what dynamic websites are all about
It does seem odd that NewTek, once huge proponents of the Amiga, now refuse to consider alternative systems...
They are prefectly valid arguments. In my experience there's not been a professional unix admin in most small scale digital design houses. As far as a free os making turnkey a unique proposition, well that's ludicrous. It's impossible to pair up your average linux dist with any particular machine and have it "just work" with the full feature set. Support is more than paying some consultant to come and do backups and installs and kluge some scripts together. Support at this level is when someone guarantees that their product will work and when there are problems they are willing to put a man in your shop in less than 24 hours to make it work again.
No I don't miss the point. I'm seeing one large company that is putting capital into research. I see another company looking for a way off the sinking ship. When the big names are putting as much into Linux as they are into their flagship products, then we'll re-assess the support situation.
Different opinions I guess.
That's why the source is being released. No one else to work on it. You can bet that once people improve it, SGI will take those improvments and roll them back into their own products.
Clustering is a very important technology, that works very well for some applications. But there are some very important, real world applications that will be very difficult (if not impossible) to implement in a clustered environment.
A real world example: A travel reservation company uses a 32 processor Origin 2000 with 16 GBs of memory. They load all of the data (flight schedules, hotel availability, rental car data - about 8 GBs) into a shared memory area, where processes running on all 32 processors can access them directly.
Imagine how difficult that would be to implement in a clustered environment, with the data spread across the system memory of multiple machines. Just finding all the flights from Austin to San Jose would be a nightmare, then you have to worry about locking, etc.
Clustering is great, but it is not the best solution for all problems.
An open-source alternative to Inventor is Quesa. Quesa implements the Quickdraw 3D API, which includes a nice hierarchical scene system.
OpenGL is WAY easier to use then D3D.
:)
... because of some "politics" 3D accelerated graphics card vendors are prefering iplementing DirectX acceleration Thats because Microsoft IS so bull-headed after buying Direct3D from Rendermorphics :) Man, do you really believe this is the issue? If you know how d3d drivers are developped, you'd know that a vendor can create a d3d driver for his card with a very small piece of code. So a vendor can easily create D3D drivers for his card, which means there are _always_ d3d drivers for a certain piece of hardware. An OpenGL ICD on the other hand takes a lot more time, because the vendor has to write the complete renderpipeline in the ICD. Ok, they get a basic framework from SGI, but still.. it's a lot more work. In the past, vendors just didn't release any ICD because it would cost too much (S3 comes to mind), but today thankfully any decent cardmaker releases an ICD. It's however a shame not all of those cardmakers include all the new HW features in the ICD via extensions as nVidia does. :(
This is of course very dependant on your skills in the area of the API. If you don't get Binary Objects, if you don't understand OO, you'll NEVER understand D3D. It will be very hard then. OpenGL is a difficult API to master as D3D is too. Everyone can cook up a spinning cube, not everyone can cook up a 10.000 poly world running at decent framespeeds with a lot of different textures.
OpenGL is orthogonal. SGI had tons of experience with IrisGL before they cleaned it up and "re-named" it OpenGL.
Well, there are still some IrisGL leftovers in the OpenGL that should have been removed already. Some things are odd in OpenGL, I wouldn't call it orthogonal
OpenGL has a consistent design (look at Direct3D having 7 versions in 5 year!) OpenGL has gone thru 2 iterations in 10 years. Does that mean OpenGL has been slow to change? No, as vendors are allowed to add any extenstion they wish.
Sorry to interrupt your dreams, but OpenGL seriously is moving forward WAY too slow. I mean by this that the 1.2 specs are great but they are great for a long time already. It's now official and finally we begin to see 1.2 compliant subsystems, but it took way too long, so currently a lot of subsystems don't support any nice features which are provided by the hardware. If the standard would have forced the functionality earlier, Matrox and S3 would have been forced to implement more functionality than they did today. NO Matrox OpenGL driver NOR S3 OpenGL driver supports ANY features which make these cards outstanding: the Matrox bumpmapping in the Gxxx series and the S3 texturecompression. Sure, extensions have an advantage: vendors don't have to wait for the library supplier to release an updated version, but it also doesn't force vendors to add the features.
D3D is a young api. OpenGL is based on IrisGL. Every new technology has it's problems when it's created. IrisGL had these too. D3D is up to par now. It's however IMHO not correct to say: D3D is crap because they had a lot of version in a short time. That's BECAUSE it's new.
OpenGL also has a conformance test, guaranteeing that all OpenGL implementations are feature complete, unlike D3D. Does that guarantee speed? No. Drivers are allowed to "fall-back" into software.
Feature complete is somehow a bit stupid here. 'Feature complete' refers to the 1.1 or 1.2 featureset. 1.2 is too new to be very common, and 1.1 is very old. To be 1.1 compatible doesn't say a thing nowadays. For example ARB_multitexturing, a MUST HAVE feature today, isn't in the 1.1 set. The software fall back is a thing that annoys me the most on OpenGL. When I do a glEnable(GL_POLYGON_SMOOTH); on a GeForce card, it falls COMPLETE to software, because it can't do a part of the pipeline in software, but in D3d only parts of the not by hardware supported features, are done in software. That's IMHO a better approach.
I can only laugh about this.
Take care...
DemoGL main developer. DemoGL is a win32/OpenGL multimedia library.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Indeed. Microsoft bought Softimage, made them port their software to NT, and then sold the company to Avid, which is its currewnt owner.
Nvidia stuff sucks under linux. It sucks pretty badly.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I heartily agree. My brother-in-law is running Lightwave 5.6 and Maya 2.5 on his NT box because the SGI/IRIX boxes were too expensive. Both packages are great (credit to the software not NT). He used to be a diehard MAC fan but now uses whatever works best for the money. The SGI boxes they used to demo Maya are great but I don't that kind of cash at this moment. SGI is a great company and I believe they are/will be a great asset to the Linux community.
well see the other repliese we have a very good FreeOpneGl already. If you see the need to do something new - we realy don't need another rendering GL- then go start a project to create a voxel based graphics library which as far as I know does not yet exist in a way comparabel to OpenGL. And by the way what GL are acceleratorboard optimised for? Well the answer is OpenGL and maybe Direct3D and what do you think will happen if we fork OpenGL - I'm sure you dont want that.
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
Have you been living in a closet? We already have Mesa. It's damn near fully OpenGL compliant. It's supporting more and more hardware. Just why would we start from scratch again?
Glide 2/3 != OpenGL (in the case of 3Dfx)
I'm not sure about nVidia. Glide was a proprietary driver from 3Dfx (it's OS now too). But OpenGL was initially drafted as a standard 3D lib. Not quite sure on much of the other details, but simply put, it's a matter of one standard across the board irregardless of whether you've got a TNT or a VooDoo (or whatever).
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
From the FAQ
How does the Sample Implementation compare to Mesa?
We believe the Sample Implementation is strong in areas such as internal state management as well as complete feature coverage (such as the optional imaging features of the OpenGL 1.2 Specification, which Mesa does not provide). By comparision to the currently distributed SI, Mesa will probably provide better software rendering performance, and there are existing open-source hardware drivers projects based on Mesa. We think the two codebases can be complementary. Based on discussions with some of the active Mesa developers, there's a reasonable chance of merging the two together into a single reference implementation and driver kit over time.
What does this mean for Mesa-based drivers?
In the long term, it may be possible for the Sample Implementation and Mesa codebases to merge together, drawing on the different strengths of both. Whether or not this happens, elements of the Sample Implementation such as the previously released GLX will continue to be used to support drivers based on either Mesa or the Sample Implementation. We expect both Mesa-based and SI-based drivers will be widespread for some time to come.
What's missing from the current Sample Implementation?
Dynamic assembly code generation for rasterization is not yet included, making software rendering performance slow. The geometry path assembly code optimizations which we ship to our commercial licensees are actually owned by other companies, so we don't have the rights to place them under an open source license. We will work with the companies involved to try and free up these components.
There are also a number of companion libraries, such as the GLS stream codec and the GLC character renderer, which are not being open sourced now because we are uncertain of their value to the community relative to the significant resources we'd have to expend on releasing them. We continue to evaluate what OpenGL-based SGI software technologies would be suitable for open sourcing.
XFree, being an implementation of an X server, has pretty much nothing to do with OpenGL. There are two limited ways they deal with each other:
Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API. So is SGI's OpenGL® Sample Implementation. In fact, the reason SGI first started calling it "Open" (instead of simply "GL" for "Graphics Library") was because they cleaned up and published the API, then gave people permission to implement it.
As has been posted elsewhere on this thread, SGI is making vague noises about OpenGL and Mesa merging. This would be a wonderful example of how open source licenses actively discourage forking (as discussed in the context of the GPL in Linuxcare back in November).
If you want to know more about the hoary guts of OpenGL, and not just the API, I'd suggest looking up some of Akeley's articles on the hardware from prior SIGGRAPH proceedings.
Both Inventor and Performer are toolkits developed by SGI to run on top of OpenGL and simplify application development. Inventor is targeted more at interactive applications, like modelers (I wrote one in Inventor before it was released in less than five days, having never seen the library before - see Paul Strauss's and Rikk Carey's SIGGRAPH paper). Performer is targeted more at walkthroughs, flight simulators, and the like.
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Klactovedestene!
Funny you should mention Avid. Didn't they stop supporting Apple's QuickTime format and/or MacOS, thus making their video editing systems Windows-specific, for fear of retaliation from MS?
Yes, OpenGL is not a program. It is an API. Forking an API is just as bad as forking the linux kernel(or any OS); It leads to bad things. Mesa and certified OpenGL implementations are in essence two forks of the same API. You may say that the function calls are the same, or the visual effects are the same. But that doesn't matter, there are features Mesa doesn't support. Forking OpenGL would fragment the UNIX graphics community and create havoc for those of us who have real work to do.
One thing I really like about OpenGL is that there have only been 3 versions. v1.0, v1.1, and v1.2. That makes it pretty easy to pick your applications and your implementations. SGI has done the (TM)"Right Thing" and I believe will lead to a much better, much more compatible Mesa and accelereted OpenGL implementations created by many people.
Look at the results:
Companies can now release the source to their Windoze GL implementations, leading to integration of accelerated hardware support possibly being implemented in Mesa. I doubt this will change the OpenGL trademarking or certification procedures, hence Mesa will still not be certified. However, Mesa can finally be really compliant while supporting in a single code tree all hardware whose respective companies choose to release source! A very good thing.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
You might not agree with me that software rendering is already dead today but what about 1 year from now?
But you're talking about gl wrappers running on mainstream video cards like Voodoo's and TNT's. That's a lot different from the NT OpenGL implementations that professionals use on ~$1000 video cards like 3DLab's Oxygens. Titanic was actually made using a DEC Alpha running NT using one of those 96MB Oxygen boards. That's the area that SGI is facing competition from, and where Mesa doesn't quite cut it. Hopefully, movies in the future will be made on Alphas or SGI's running Linux instead!
If that's the case, then wouldn't 1U (unit) rackmounted linux/freeBSD boxes be the trick?
Most of the SGI stuff can be Rackmounted. The Octanes were great too! (the only thing it was missing was a cdrom drive)
>Why would Sun even *want* consumers to use their products? That's not their business plan.
Check news.com. Apparently, they released the code today.
Take a newbie and get him started on D3D. Take another newbie and have him use OpenGL. Who will have working code sooner? :) You see: perhaps the learning curve of d3d is steeper than OpenGL's, but in the end if you want to program a full application and you need all the API's power to achieve good quality, it takes the same amount of time and effort to get there.
:). I think that the understanding these things are important is part of the learning process of both api's. The api's both provide different solutions to achieve the same goal, but the goal first has to be determined by the programmer. newbies never get that :)
the OpenGL newbie will definitely have a rotating polygon sooner. But that's not the point I was refering to
Once you need to start worrying about Visible Surface Determination, the API isn't the bottleneck: Your culling / occlusion algorithms are, along with state minimization, and texture management. Wouldn't you agree?
I agree. It's however funny to see people first don't understand statechanges are expensive and visual face determination IS important
For the most part it is. I'm curious, what part of OpenGL isn't orthogonal? For me: display lists: it's a whole bunch of hoopla but no speed increase nowadays, and the global orientation of the code: it's nice to have everything global, but it can also work against you, especially in a OOP environment IMHO.
MS shoved D3D down our game developer throats whether we wanted it or not. OpenGL works for games, as Carmack has shown us. They already had OpenGL on NT, why did they have to go and FIX ANOTHER API?
There were numerous api's. Not one was 'major', perhaps Glide was. MS created DX (not only D3D) to provide a uniform layer of abstract code using COM, which was always the same, independant of the underlying hardware. It solved a problem for gameprogrammers: which api would we take? Glide? MeTal? OpenGL? Not one of these was supported by ALL cards. D3D is. For gameprogrammers this was a blessing because they could now focus on 1 API.
The D3D drivers are very small, because the HW vendor just has to implement the very basic stuff to communicate with the hardware. The rest is already implemented in the HAL. That's why it's easy to provide a good d3d driver, the opengl icd has to contain that HAL AND the HEL and the driver.
Question: How does a vendor provide extensions in D3D ? Oh wait, they CAN'T, unless they pesister MS to provide it in a future D3D version.
Afaik, Dx7 also contains an extension mechanism.
Nice job on DemoGL.
Thanks!
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
God, I love SGI. I'm glad to see another big company actually put their source code where their mouth is. Sun are you listening?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
i like sgi, but i don't think they are doing enough to support linux on their machines, no x server for indys, etc.
they need to make a concerted effort to get more tools ported, too -- maybe even that cvd debugger.
man i love their hardware, it is always so funny to see the monkeys post about their "750 mhz athlon" -- they have absolutely no clue how wonderful it is to develop under SGI/Irix -- it really makes me cringe to write under linux/pc crapware.
hope SGI continues to embrace os community.
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See my user info for links.
I have heard it said, and I will say it myself, Irix is perhaps the BEST operating system in existence right now.
Well, I'm definitely in agreement with a qualifier similar to your other comment:
It is a joy to be a developer on IRIX.
That's really the key isn't it: development. What people forget that the most expensive resource isn't the computer; it's the developer. Chances are very slim (in today's economy) that, if you're a working developer, you cost your employer less than the computer that you work at. Even better, your fully loaded rate (with overhead, etc.) is likely several times higher than an amortized billing / lease rate for your machine.
In short, it makes economic sense to pick the tools that make your (expensive!) workers most effective. In my case, I've been working with UNIX (and other OSes) for about 20 years; I find IRIX to be the best all-around package. Then there's the real-time capabilities: nanosecond-level real-time clocks, anyone?
On the other hand, for those running render farms (batch processing of animations), they need cheap cycles, so they don't really care about "development." To my mind, they shouldn't be buying computers at all, they should be renting the cycles. That sort of drives down your "total cost of ownership...".
My favorite comments, though, are when person P says something along the lines of "application X isn't supported on IRIX, so it sucks and is dying off" (e.g., Multigen Creator).
Well, if application X is a requirement right now, it's a requirement; choose a supported a platform and get to work. Note, however, that a lot of those types of applications are also not supported on Linux. Well, P, by the transitive property, you're saying that Linux sucks and is dying off, too. Are you sure you want to say that? Here? Go on, I dare you....
-- Doctor Bob
What will happen to Mesa now? Who will assimilate who?
Um, lets see...
Open GL, USB, PCI, AGP.
If you haven't been paying attention, Apple's pride is on the back burner as far as NIH.
This is probably good news, but why should the community mess around trying to make SGI's outdated proprietary software work for them? Forget OpenGL, we need to develop a fully open set of drivers, so that the community can continue to develop good applications and games without the intrinsic restrictions of the form. I say we need to start a FreeOpenGL project -- I'd volunteer to lead it, but have neither the time nor (probably) the ability. Will someone else pick up the baton?
The Sun boxes are -flat-, like pizza box dimension flat. Can you get rack mount chassis that hold PIIIs or Athlons (with their annoying propensity to want to sit perpendicular to the motherboard) that are that thin? I honestly don't know, but I don't think it's possible due to the Slot1 layout.
The newer flat PIIIs might work better, but those weren't available when Pixar was working on TS2.
Actually as I understand it Mesa is much more "quality" than most nt/winblows gl wrappers. What mesa lacks is ease of use, and ease of install, and speed. Not really quality. It fails a very few of the gl tests, where most 3dcards only work for a few gl tests. Most gl wrappers (excluding monsters like the WildCat 4's) are only for games. All the rest is left out.
...cheaper than an Oxygen...
I meant Octane. (must not type late at night...)
Sorry for the stupid question, but how does the stuff SGI released relate to XFree 4 and Mesa? Also, could somebody please explain how the accelerated 3d graphics will work in Linux? (as in the architecture)
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The above link gets you three javascript-spawned windows, all of which go to pr0n.
I wish these fscking click-farming trolls would find some other form of amusement.
>> OpenGL is WAY easier to use then D3D.
;-)
:)
:) Man, do you really believe this is the issue?
>This is of course very dependant on your skills in the area of the API.
Take a newbie and get him started on D3D.
Take another newbie and have him use OpenGL.
Who will have working code sooner?
Granted, once you understand the 3d pipeline, moving to another API is not too difficult.
> If you don't get Binary Objects, if you don't understand OO, you'll NEVER understand D3D. Everyone can cook up a spinning cube,
Seems like OpenGL is easier to learn then?
> not everyone can cook up a 10,000 poly world running at decent framespeeds with a lot of different textures.
Once you need to start worrying about Visible Surface Determination, the API isn't the bottleneck: Your culling / occlusion algorithms are, along with state minimization, and texture management. Wouldn't you agree?
> Some things are odd in OpenGL, I wouldn't call it orthogonal
For the most part it is. I'm curious, what part of OpenGL isn't orthogonal?
Last time I read the spec, I didn't see any discretions. Maybe Jon Leech can point out a few?
> Feature complete is somehow a bit stupid here.
Compared to cap-bits?! Capability bits break when you have 2 mutual exclusive features. No thanks. Of the 2 methods, I'll take (slow) feature complete, over missing features. Its the best of worst worlds.
Let's not forgot "feature complete" and cap-bits, do not tell you how FAST something is implemented. Remember, some people prefer quality, others prefer framerate. Feature complete or cap-bits doesn't answer those 2 scenarios. At least your game will visually look the same on different hardware (assuming the drivers aren't broken.)
> It's however IMHO not correct to say: D3D is crap because they had a lot of versions in a short time. That's BECAUSE it's new.
So you're telling me that you still want to use executive buffers from DX3 ? I don't see them in DX7 ! D3D is already 5 years old, thats not new.
>> Thats because Microsoft IS so bull-headed after buying Direct3D from Rendermorphics
> I can only laugh about this.
MS shoved D3D down our game developer throats whether we wanted it or not. OpenGL works for games, as Carmack has shown us. They already had OpenGL on NT, why did they have to go and FIX ANOTHER API?
> If you know how d3d drivers are developped, you'd know that a vendor can create a d3d driver for his card with a very small piece of code.
I can't comment on this having never seen any d3d driver code. I'm not a driver writer, just a game developer. Have you seen any d3d driver code?
Ok, I'll buy the bit where OpenGL drivers are harder to develop then D3D drivers.
> It's however a shame not all of those cardmakers include all the new HW features in the ICD via extensions as nVidia does
That's for sure.
Question: How does a vendor provide extensions in D3D ? Oh wait, they CAN'T, unless they pesister MS to provide it in a future D3D version.
Nice job on DemoGL.
Cheers
This is how I think it works...now this is just a buddy and me asking ourselves how would we do this. But here goes....As I read it, this is a software rendered OpenGL implementation without some of the software optimizers. However you take this piece combine it with the specs of what your particular card can do in hardware...and doing alot of coding...and you end up with a hardware-accelerated OpenGL driver for whatever card you were working with.
Am I even close?
Remove the spam reference to email
Be sure to take a look at the Project List page at oss.sgi.com, some interesting stuff is listed there.
No, there hasn't been any word as far as I know. However, it has been discussed and so far everyone seems to think it's a reasonable idea. Who knows maybe it will even happen someday. Personally, I'd like to see all our scene graphs go to open source.
One day they'll give me moderator points and you're getting all of them. I think this post is at least as interesting as the 50 posts marked Interesting which all say "Great, does this mean we'll see more games? What about Mesa?". Good work, dude.
What was this Simple Implementation before it was open source? Was this something they sold to the commercial apps before? Has anyone gone to look at the code to see what this actually is?
I agree it's a step towards full open source, but I wonder if it's not just a baby step.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
DirectX/Direct3D isn't portable.
OpenGL is available on almost all major/minor platforms. For starters: Win, Mac, Linux, Be, etc.
First glQuake, now OpenGL source. Its a good year to be a 3d programmer.
Does this mean we'll FINALLY see an OpenGL driver for 3Dfx cards?
No flames, but the OpenGL driver has been in beta now, for what, a year?
Cheers
First, I'm not familiar with the differences between Mesa and OpenGL.
Now I'm wondering, if they are thinking about merging both sources, is there any chance that what's different in Mesa could influence OpenGL's specification?
OpenInventor is no longer sgi's. I believe it now belongs to them.
If you poke around on the A|W site, you'll find information about becoming a beta-tester for the Linux beta of Maya. You'll have to find it yourself because I don't want to cut into my chances of actually making the cut.
Softimage, I don't know, although it would be really nice to see. Avid has owned Softimage for a couple of years now, and Softimage development is actually done by some company in Germany I think, (rather like the way 3DSMax is, or was, owned by Autodesk but developed by Kinetix.) so it's kind of confusing to follow, but IIRC, they do at least offer their Mental Ray rendering engine on Linux and have for a couple of years now.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
> Not one of these was supported by ALL cards. D3D is.
;-)
I don't see D3D drivers for our $10,000 video cards. I see OpenGL drivers, but no D3D.
> For gameprogrammers this was a blessing because they could now focus on 1 API.
You've never done any ports, have you?
D3D is not available on consoles. That's a BIG chuck on the games industry right there !
Use D3D and you're LOCKED into Windows. That's a curse, not a blessing. I'd rather use an API that lets our games be developed on several platforms.
OpenGL is portable among Win, Linux, Mac, even to a degree on N64.
What did Carmack say, how many lines of code was different for Quake3? 18K ?
> For me: display lists: it's a whole bunch of hoopla but no speed increase nowadays
I can see you've also never used the high-end SGI's. Display lists were faster, since the geometry had to be static.
But you're right, today on PC's display lists show no gain, due to bandwidth bottlenecks.
Cheers
Actually, (not to be a wise ass) Titanic was made
with a few hundred such workstations (don't remember the number exactly) and final renderings
were made with a few hundered more.
I also belive that much of the water effects were
rendered on SGIs...but I could be wrong.
This is actually a very insightful take on SGI's current strategy.
;-)
... I mean "tools"! ;-) Seriously, though, that's also an annual savings; keep that infrastructure up to date.
Thanks, I like pretending I know what I'm talking about....
The "NT mindshare" question is an interesting one, as is the "move." As far as I can tell, smart folks are thinking "we want to move away from HP (or VAX or whatever) hardware to something that's more commercial / consumer grade." The smart ones are not saying, "NT is better than UNIX." They just haven't had a viable choice up until now (remember, all decisions must be defensible).
I am literally watching government project managers changing their minds and saying, "No, we've decided to go with Linux rather than NT on our PC-based-replacement for legacy hardware. Why? Because it's X-Windows, Unix-ish, etc., and thus has lower risk than MFC-ing, NutCrackering or Java-ing our code." We're seeing the NT "pull" evaporate; as far as I can tell, the only "push" left is inertia (of which the government has a lot).
Two somewhat related items:
1. I'd seen several remarks implying that SGI hardware rules SETI but might have limited utility elsewhere. I think we've agreed that if something is in use (and has strong advocates), it's gotta have measurable utility.
However, I'd never tried the SETI work units on my R12000 at work. Given that some benchmarks indicate that Pentium III-based machines are right on top of SGI performance (e.g., CPU95 at www.spec.org), I thought it'd be interesting to try a "real" cross-platform application (remember, your mileage may vary; chances are slim that your full-time employment is as a SETI scientist...):
3 h 27 m: PIII 500 Mhz Wintendo98 = 4%
16 h 22 m: PMMX 233 Mhz WinNT = 58%
3 h 27 m: R12K 300 Mhz Irix 6.5 = 100%
Swell, the R12000 does great FFTs, what's the point? The thing is, that's the kind of thing I do: lots of real-time floating point. More importantly, we're not talking about a few percent; this is a different order of magnitude! For completeness, compare the price on a Dell workstation (as tested for SPEC) to a single R12K SGI Octane. The SGI will likely be more but not by an order of magnitude....
2. In terms of "pennywise", I've started pushing for the idea that if we developers are willing to have less people (at hiring time, not layoffs!), the management should reinvest that "savings" into our infrastructure. Salary + benefits + overhead comes to quite a lot in today's economy. Split between a group of 3-4 developers, it can buy lots and lots of toys
I've actually started using it as a metric for employment; if your PHBs just pocket the money, you know it's time to look for another job.
-- Doctor Bob
My favorite comments, though, are when person P says something along the lines of "application X isn't supported on IRIX, so it sucks and is dying off" (e.g., Multigen Creator).
;-)
Well, if application X is a requirement right now, it's a requirement; choose a supported a platform and get to work.
Which was my point in the other part of this discussion (which I think you are refering to). The question I was answering was not about MIPS, but about the previous poster's (in that branch of this discussion) query as to why anyone would consider art asset creation on NT boxes.
We had SGIs. They were expensive to buy, expensive to own, and had very expensive software with expensive yearly support contracts. Then those application developers started making their software for NT (many times devoting their resources to the NT version before the IRIX version). Suddenly being on IRIX wasn't very useful. Moving to NT got us the better software, at better prices, and with lower $/machine. We went where the tools we needed were.
Now, IRIX might not be "dying", but a lack of applications on any given platform is usually not a good portent for the continuing viability of that platform.
Note, however, that a lot of those types of applications are also not supported on Linux. Well, P, by the transitive property, you're saying that Linux sucks and is dying off, too. Are you sure you want to say that? Here? Go on, I dare you....
I never infered that Linux sucks. It most definately doesn't. I've already asked numerous people at MultiGen if they are considering a Linux port of Creator and if so, when. We moved from IRIX to NT because that was where the tools we needed were and the hardware was much less expensive. We'll move again if there is sufficient reason (i.e. needed applications exist there and the hardware won't bankrupt us) to do so.
Comparing Linux to IRIX (or saying that I'm infering that Linux sucks because of a lack of certain applications) in the context of this discussion isn't really valid. Linux will run on low cost, high powered hardware. IRIX will (currently) only run on expensive proprietary SGI boxes. If the choice came down to Linux on Intel or IRIX on MIPs, all other things being equal, we'd take the Linux route because it would be a better use of our $.
Halting the 320 & 540 was the best decision SGI made in relation to the whole NT thing.
Sad to say, I have to agree with you. I loved the 320; I came close to buying one for my home (and cash flow is tight with another kidling on the way). At the same time, I need SGI to stay in business; they're still making the best tools for my work. If SGI can manage to make something much like the 320/540 but is commercially viable over the long haul and runs all my favorite applications (!), I'm there.
Re: MIPS = dead: somebody's confused. MIPS makes the most popular embedded processor in the world. Period. Maybe User X (who may or may not have worked for SGI in the past) doesn't do floating point calcs anymore, but 3.5 hours for a SETI work unit is a serious motivator in my business. Signal processing and visualization at the same time?!
BTW, when I heard about the "SGI is a UNIX company = Linux + IRIX" press release, my first response was, "Now there's a ballsy decision." I still feel it was the right move (and I wish I had had serious money to buy SGI when it was at $6 per share).
PS: Let me know if SGI could use any east coast industry-advocates. I accept payment in cool t-shirts....
[An early 1990s beta-tester for Crimson, Irix 5.0a, Delta C++, etc.]
-- Doctor Bob
Now what I'd like to know is what's going on as far as SGI/Linux graphics machines go - you see, I have this old PC I'd love to upgrade soon :-)
From what I gather, it appears that SGI might be asking VA Linux to build the systems using Nvidia graphics hardware and, probably, an SGI openGL subsystem.
May I also make a suggestion that SGI consider what to do about the other multimedia API's they own - video and audio in particular. Although I cannot expect PC hardware to easily support an API like SGI's libvl, SGI should perhaps look to support this on hardware they build (or have built). What's the chance of ever seeing something like OpenVL and/or OpenAL?
After all, once XFS (and hopefully XLV) is ported, we'll need something substantial to thrash those disks - what's better than D1 video?
Keep up the great work!
Alastair
IRIX is _that_ cool, I hear. I'd like to run it on my laptop (PowerPC), but I can't think of a way to re-target it there without the source code.
--
Check this out
Coin
Dude check her out in that new Susan Serandin movie. NP's face has got a bunch of moles. Ewwww. Instead take a look at Sabrina the witch, now there's a honey.
It'll take a while. Renderers maybe, but before we see the complete apps being ported over we'll to see more graphic software companies stating plans to port their goods, as well. Take Photoshop & Illustrator for two. Premiere, for three. Those all go hand in hand with Lightwave or any other 3D package, and they'ed be not useless, but not extremely useful, without the side programs.
Does Microsoft invent ANYTHING>?? Or at least develop it themselves??
At this list there is a list of all the products and companies that MS has purchased rather than just imitating, and practically every single thing they own is on that list. Such 'innovation'!
Also, the sheer amount of things listed in the '99 secion there is truly disturbing.
Juln
It was a delay tactic. MS quietly dropped farenheit a while ago.
Basically, they wanted to slow down OpenGL development, so they conned SGI into devoting a load of their resources to Farenheit, and all the while continued developing direct3d (the 3d part of directx), being careful to change the api every time.
They pulled the same trick with IBM. Bill Gates has gone on record saying "OS/2 is the future", when microsoft co-developed it - then MS came out with the deliberately incompatible win32 api, and killed OS/2.
However, SGI didn't fall for it, since MS has pulled that trick too many times.
Of course, there's a difference between their OpenGL sample implementation and the private SGI OpenGL implementation (and the difference is... speed). Still, this is cool, although SGI could have saved themselves the grief of Microsoft's DirectX crap taking off if they had Open sourced this years ago. ( Amazing how generously giving stuff away just makes people like me whine.)
Now we just need OpenInventor open sourced, and there will be a real chance of DirectX biting the dust. (Novices find it far easier to put together interactive 3D apps with a decent scene graph implementation).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I bought an Indy hoping to run Linux on it. Linux on MIPS hardware doesn't even run X-Windows. I'd be really happy if this support for hardware OpenGL is extended to the Indy. Then maybe I'll have X-Windows on it! Of course I doubt I'll ever see that. The last status update for the project on SGI's web site is almost a year old.
Yes, its very good to see SGI lay the ground for 3D hardware accelarated graphics (even if theyre not the first ones in this area).
;-).
With this, Creative supporting their fine SBLive! and HP/VALinux starting to improve printing (see story below) the infrastructure for desktop applications and home use gets laid down. It seems there is a bright future for penguins on computers
wumpie
Prior to this, it sounded like GEForce was going to come out with full Linux support, and it was going to be branded OpenGL. But it also appeared that the drivers would be closed source.
Philosophically, that puts the GEForce at a serious disadvantage relative to Matrox, 3dfx, or ATI.
This may change things. (I hope.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Here at my university, the computer graphics TA always says stuff like "well if you're working with _Mesa_, I'm sorry but you're going to get visual artifacts, and see how this shading happens here, that's because you're using _Mesa_. When you compile on the NT's it'll look all pretty". And I thought Mesa was still lots slower because the algorithms aren't as tight. Will it be easy to incorporate what's needed into Mesa and turn it into the same quality OpenGL implementation as is on any NT box?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
There will be future SGI graphics workstations that run* Linux :) This would be (at least from what I've heard) one of the reasons we open-sourced OpenGL.
* - This is in addition to the ones that run Irix, which, of course, will continue to be produced.
I speak for myself, not for SGI.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Well it seems that besides SideFX Houdini port another high end suite will soon be available for Linux - Im talking about Realsofts Realsoft 4D (successor of Real3D) which is about to released during the 1st quarter of 2000. Check out http://www.realsoft.fi
What use is code if you know nothing about nvidia hardware. Nvidia could have had much faster months ago, if they would have given out information on there hardware, and just other people make drivers for them.
Even if that scared them, they could have made a faster driver. Voodoo3/Banshee have a beta DRI OpenGL driver, which is stable (but it doesn't support mouse dga, so it is kinda crappy for quake), and fast. Matrox + ATI cards use there own architecture. And even though they each use a different architecture, they are all compatible with opengl games like quake3, xracer, and whatever other popular opengl game there is for linux;-)
Don't accept excuses from Nvidia saying their specs are too hard to understand, or XFree86 4.0 isn't out yet. You have alternatives, for most major commercial 3d cards out there.
Yes, sort of. Media Composers are mainly Mac but it's arguable whether some strategic OS shift didn't happen when Symphony was released - an NT uncompressed editing solution. Symphony is considered the 'high-end' Avid system. Ofcourse Softimage DS is a high-end system as well - running on NT only again.
As for lower-end systems - although still slightly anachronistic with respect to Avid, they've been making lower end systems for a while (Cinema, Xpress etc.) and are trying to make more in-roads at the lower end with DV enabled machines.
When MS took over Soft, NT was nowhere as far as multimedia applications went. The port of Soft went a long way to changing people's perception of the OS for graphics. I am hopeful that SGI might play the enabler (like MS for NT) for Linux multimedia.
People who read SGI news groups might remember a thread a long while ago called 'female spiders eat their lovers' - a thread that appeared after SGI's announcement of a joint initiative with MS on Farenheit. The thread was overwhelmingly negative and concerned about working with MS (given all the issues/FUD between DirectX and OpenGL). It could be sweetly ironic to see SGI bounce back with multimedia/graphics/openGL on Linux. Silicon Graphics, remember!
This is the reference implementation for OpenGL. This is what a licensee would get prior to this change in licensing when they paid SGI big bucks to license the OpenGL name and produce an OpenGL driver/library set for a given OS. With it, you could produce a clean, 100% compliant driver and library set.
It's a quantum leap towards full Open Source by SGI- it's been one of their crown jewels.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"then you have to worry about locking..."
are you saying that you just let all 32 processes currently running on those 32 CPUs have at the data in the shared memory at once? you're fired.
Ahem...
;-)
SGI turned a profit in the second quarter, if you read their web page.
Sure, it's because their restructuring charge was smaller than expected, but they still would have only lost a million dollars.
I suppose the important question is "Will it continue?" But that's for the stock analysts to sort out.
Personally, I think you're wrong on MIPS and Irix.
WRT the pricing model: If you want a cheap SGI, buy one of their remanufactured, older, and slower Indigo2s. Besides the slower processor, they're probably as good as Sun's Ultra 5s for $1000 less!
But SGI doesn't really exist to sell cheap, slow hardware.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
> And, besides, the GPL doesn't give freedom. It takes it away.
Wrong. Under American and European Union copyright law, unlicensed code is proprietary, even if a third party sees the source. It has to be explicitly placed in the public domain if you want maximal freedom - even a single "//I, John Doe place this code in the public domain" will do. Therefore, the GPL gives more freedom than the default case.
The GPL gives freedom - marginally less than BSD.
The essence of the restriction on the GPL is that you use the code - so long as you don't try and take away another's right to use your derived version of the code, if you _release_ a binary. (In-house use is fine.)
No one is forcing you to use the GPL code, you are completely free to write your own clean-room implementation of anything you fancy in the GPL family - just don't use the GPL code if you want to be able to produce a proprietary derived product.
Remember, it is the author's choice as to what license he uses for original code, so respect that. Microsoft is free to just recompile all the BSD code for its cli network tools (which is what it does,btw), and the BSDers are cool with that -
that's the decision they made using their license.
Other people don't want a similar thing to happen
to their code, so they can use the GPL - but the important point here is that the developer is granting you freedom to use the code, given certain conditions. At no point can he "take away" your freedom, because the default state is for you not to be able to use any of his code, even if you see it.
By the way, the copyright holder of the code can release a separately licensed verion of the code to you, if he so wishes, thus forking a version of the codebase to you - thus even if SGI were to GPL their OpenGL release, all anyone who wanted to use the code in a proprietary tree. would have to do is ask SGI if they can have or purchase a differently licensed version from them. Cygnus and several other companies make major money this way, particularly in the embedded market.
That's why copyright tracking is so important with GPL software - Linus couldn't release a proprietary version of the Linux kernel without first obtaining the consent of all the contributors to the kernel. Linus makes a point of not asking people to assign copyright of contributed code to him - it inspires trust that he will never attempt to proprietarise the kernel
However, if all the contributors to a codebase assign copyright over, it is possible for the copyright holder to release a proprietary version if he so chooses. BUT - the previously released GPL version is still out there, so someone else can start a new code fork from the last GPL release.
Also, of course, the GPL combats microsoft's favourite "embrace,extend,extinguish" methodology, as detailed in the infamous halloween memos, since derived changes have to be published, and therefore any "improvements" microsoft make have to be published, and can be integrated straight back into the original code base if useful - thus the GPL discourages code forking, and hastens software evolution.
I realise you may not be a lawyer, but I felt that
in a public forum, misinformation such as your closing line should be corrected.
You know, Natalie Portman's a pretty intelegent person (into sciance, etc). I wouldn't be to surprized if her future/current boyfrend (or even herself, but that's a strech) was a slashdot reader.
But, that said, this meme is getting kind of lame. OSS man, buy yourself a gene sequencer and start coding or fucking give up. NP isn't even really that atractive. I'm she was hot as a 13yo in the professional but after that...
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If you had said QuickDraw 3D, one might agree, even if it was still a C API [but they had at least one Scheme guy to help architect something extendable within the constraints of Bell's portable assembly].
No doubt about it! Although the work by the MesaGL group is more in line with some of the more radical among us, there can be no doubt that a Major player like SGI is needed to help lend legitimacy to Linux. Having worked extensively with IRIX in the early 90's I can vouch for the thoroughness and quality of an SGI UNIX implementation. There port of GL GLX, OpenGL to Linux will be top notch. They do good work.
-DF
It's not obvious that anybody will necessarily assimilate anybody. Let me be perfectly clear that we are not doing this to "kill Mesa" or anything idiotic like that. Mesa has a lot of good stuff in it and, unlike the Sample Implementation, there are some open source Mesa hardware drivers available today. On the other hand, the SI does some things that Mesa does not, and almost all closed source hardware drivers are based off the SI - so companies who choose to open source their own drivers in the future will be able to do so now.
There are a lot of ways we may be able to share code and work together, and we've been in touch with Brian Paul about this for quite a while. None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
> why oh WHY did they not just help mesa out ?
/. at: 1 2223
Brian Paul (Mesa author) ALREADY has the OpenGL reference driver and code.
You can find some info on
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/01/18/12
And at: http://www.mesa3d.org/
This current release is just icing on the cake.
Cheers
M$ sold Softimage in exchange for Avid stock. So now not only are you buying Microsoft when paying for Softimage, but for any other Avid products as well.
I'm tempted to think that this announcement from
SGI has a lot to do with the announcement the
other day from nVidia, VA Linux and SGI. This
seems like an important step in the process to
get an official OpenGL implementation running
on Linux.
--- -
I always enjoy posts from the previous SGI-er. Somehow, the world hasn't changed for them, and their knowledge of what is happening in SGI. Every line of code, every building, we even are still using the same coffee grounds .
Mips is _not_ dead. In spite of the fact that MIPS was spun out, SGI retained the high-end design teams within. SGI has announced and shown the roadmap for Mips chips and technology for computers (versus the embedded world) that currently runs through 2006.
Please take a look at the Irix/Mips Roadmap.
Dave McAllister
Director, Strategic Technologies
Linux and Open Source
Open Source Ronin
They _where_ in a bad position, and have taken the _only_ way forward.
As Tim Sweeney (Unreal programmer) pointed on his rant about programming languages, games have a big influence in the course of graphics technology. Last year it looked like ActiveX was winning more and more mindshare in the games industry. If it weren't for John Carmack and the Linux crowd, M$ would have had its way.
Now OpenGL is back again, but it needs the support of the community. The only way to get it is to support open source.
I think OpenGL is in the same position as Netscape. They are cross-platform, and what is clear now from the success of Linux is that bein cross-platform is a huge advantage! OpenGL will be a success and will draw money towards SGI enviroment. If they change their business model and work out how to cash a part of this money, they will be back again.
If you look at Sun, they are making money of Java even though you can get all of the stuff for free (except the EEJB brand). But they make money because people thinks about SUN when they think about Java.
In short. I expect both Mozilla and OpenGL to be big successes in the medium term.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I always enjoy posts from the previous SGI-er. Somehow, the world hasn't changed for them, and their knowledge of what is happening in SGI. Every line of code, every building, we even are still using the same coffee grounds .
Mips is _not_ dead. In spite of the fact that MIPS was spun out, SGI retained the high-end design teams within. SGI has announced and shown the roadmap for Mips chips and technology for computers (versus the embedded world) that currently runs through 2006.
Please take a look at the Irix/Mips Roadmap.
Dave McAllister
Open Source Ronin
"Sample Implementation" means that the code serves as a reference to how the OpenGL, GLX, and GLU APIs are supposed to work. It's also used by our current licensees (and hopefully by open source projects in the future) as a starting point for writing hardware drivers.
The release includes what our commercial licensees have been receiving, except for a handful of optional elements that SGI does not own, such as tuned geometry acceleration for different CPUs. Hopefully the other companies involved will choose to open up those pieces too.
Basically, this is one part - albeit a big part - of the set of things that go into an OpenGL driver.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
... But it's a NIGHTMARE to be an IRIX administrator.
Where's that PAM support SGI???
I don't know how you could consider it not open source; please read the license.
Being "GPL-compatible" is a red herring. Mesa is now under the X license, and the Sample Implementation we just released is under a license designed to be compatible with the X license, in both cases for the same reason: so that the code can be incorporated into XFree86. XFree86 is, if you will, "GPL-incompatible" and that is a conscious decision by the XFree86 project.
If you have questions about our licensing, please check the FAQ. It goes into a lot more detail.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
All the groups are working together really, with the eventual goal of a framework incorporating
XFree 4, Mesa/OpenGL, GLX, and the DRI. See
www.precisioninsight.com, dri.sourceforge.net, glx.on.openprojects.net, linux.3dfx.com, oss.sgi.com (note that while utah-glx is not in the DRI framework yet, it is being ported to it. That was always the eventual goal of the core development team)
I'm not fooled by false profits [vvbg] ;-)
at sgi, we had to take forced vacations just to help balance the books (perception-wise).
they also laid off many people to help with the perception that their cost was lower, hence resultant profits were higher.
in the end, SGI is still a losing enterprise, in terms of P&L. I don't care how they wine and dine the wall street types - I lived on the corp. campus and saw the cutbacks, the layoffs, etc etc - and add to that a totally failed "NT box thing" project (that the company was essentially betting a significant part of its future on) and it just doesn't add up to a "profitable company".
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
On win32, there are two OpenGL dlls, as any Windows OpenGL programmer knows. One is made by SGI, and the other by Microsoft. The SGI one is vastly superior in speed for software rendering, because of the dynamic code generation optimisations, I'd assert.
However, after browsing through the source tree for a while, I've found that the version released for Linux does not have these optimisations.
Before I give my speculations, I'd like to point out that I'm pretty new to the OpenGL programming scene, and I'm not completely aware of SGI's motives and resulting tactics in the past.
Here are the reasons I can speculate for this:
1) This is an example OpenGL implementation in order to assist developers in getting the implementation correct, the algorithms are not the focus of this release.
2) SGI has their own motives for not letting others know the dynamic code generation secrets due to political reasons, though I cannot fathom what they'd be.
3) Their original intention for the release of this source tree was to assist Mesa3D, and Mesa3D is a portable implementation of OpenGL, and an x86 code generator would defeat that.
All in all, I cannot settle on a single reason as to why SGI would benefit to not release the highest possible quality OpenGL code.
Any ideas?
Not the first?
You seem to be overlooking the funding SGI gave to Precision Insight for their DRI work on XFree86 4.0. SGI was there with the earliest.
Everything depends on it. They will not know success until the old logo is back.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
umm..ive been an admin on several irix boxen (from the mips r4k based indy clusters to a massive o2k with 192 cpus and everything in between (o200, o2, octane..even the new SGI/NT PCs which suck BTW etc).
I've always found irix to be the second easiest unix to admin, far better than solaris and second only to linux. inst is probably far superior to rpm/dpkg/whatever on linux and its a pretty easy OS to lock down tight (especially with irix 6.5.3m..very few security patches there since there are a handful of known holes). other than the stupid license servers i wouldnt have a problem.
so..why is it a nightmare to admin irix ?
Mesa was great, but it was slow. Hrm... this will be slower then mesa, and with less hardware support. However it will be fully compliant. The idea is to merge the two codebases.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
No, high end Avid systems are still MacOS (we have 3 here in the building). They are starting to make lower end systems (approx $10K) that are NT based. And both systems import/export QuickTime.
So we still need Mesa. A strong Mesa is the only club we have that's big enough to force OpenGL the rest of the way into open source. Don't get me wrong, this is great, and I think SGI is really doing a lot of good for open source in general and Linux in particular, but we'll be sure to make our OpenGL drivers work perfectly under Mesa as well as the official product, won't we? Anything else would be... naive.
Until OpenGL is *fully* GPL-compatible, Mesa must remain the number one 3D platform for Linux.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
They are continuing the line with the R12k and then R14k cpu's. Personally I would take either one over a pentium any day. Check their rc5 and seti block times, they smoke pentiums.
I am interesting mostly in the name we can now say that linux can support OpenGL instead of saying "well we kinda have this MEsa thing* big companies dont like using technology like Mesa with a few exceptions *cough idsoftware*.
Hopefully this will give devs to final push to start porting 3d apps to linux. I can see it now
Consumer: "Hey linux has FULL support for OPenGL"
Dev: "Hmmm cool maybe Ill have to mess around with that".
What the hell am I talking about its 8:00Am and my coffee hasnt finished brewing, and I need my coffee to write karma-compliant posts.
Wrong. The Utah-GLX project have (more or less working) drivers for Matrox (G200, G400), ATI (Rage Pro), Intel (i810 I think), NVIDIA Riva series and some S3 support. Then there's 3dfx's DRI implementation, and of course NVIDIA's X server + GLX combo. So that's at least five...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
No. they do OpenInventor on non IRIX/non Linux. SGI does IRIX/Linux. And there's no Linux port.
why do good posts like this get a score of 0, and post that say "I hate M$" get a score of 5.
Well i dont think that u will see softimage on linux but avid said they r thinking about a linux port of the sumatra (the new softimage). And as for avid, they suck , they bought softimage just to get their hands on rival software and softimage3d just came along for the ride and the development on it has slowed down to a crawl , however there r rumors about sony buying softimage 3d. And way to go sidefx, they started porting houdini even before linux got any real ogl hardware suport, and looks like it came out great , hope i can get a chance to play with it soon .
heh. i propose the XFreeOpenGL due to certain design and political differences with the FreeOpenGL project. i would also lead the project but i am finishing up my PhD and don't have much time. any hackers who are interested can help by sending money directly to me at 500 South Bezzle, Morrie, Indiana. as soon as i get enough money i will set up a server and a t3 line into my house to start working on this very important project . i plan full unicode and support for blind users as well as extensive guile, gtk, perl, and python wrappers .. as well as support for clanlib, ggi, sdl, svgalib, dga/x, and the palm pilot.
What we really want is portman.
Hey, man is already available on Linux. There is no need to port man.
"Bernoulli was wrong. X proves that you can fill a vacuum, yet still it sucks." - Dennis Ritchie
Yeah sure. 'SGI has done nothing for graphics innovation'. You sound like a game-boy. Do you really think that running Quake III at a reasonable framerate is a way to benchmarks graphical processing ? NVidia is now at the point where SGI was 5 years ago dude, face the fact. Nothing beats a SGI. 'mesa blows opengl crap out of the water' Appearently, you don't know what Mesa3d is do you ? 'linux doesnt need sun, sgi, or ibm, they can all go fuck themselves. the real talent is with the linux coding community and we can do it ourselves.' Point me to an example of your coding-skills and we'll talk again. '8i on a dual p3 is about 5000% faster than a 30 cpu sun E6500' Yeah right. Even a very bad sysadmin can't slow a sun down like that ... Are you a script-kiddie ?
Wow, IRIX sounds really cool. I've only used older versions (on older Crimson and Iris workstations). Where can I grab the source?
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> i heard that developers of 3D visual apps like
...
... because of some "politics" 3D accelerated graphics card vendors are prefering iplementing DirectX acceleration
> 1. OpenGL much more than DirectX because of easier use,
OpenGL is WAY easier to use then D3D.
OpenGL is orthogonal. SGI had tons of experience with IrisGL before they cleaned it up and "re-named" it OpenGL.
OpenGL has a consistent design (look at Direct3D having 7 versions in 5 year!) OpenGL has gone thru 2 iterations in 10 years. Does that mean OpenGL has been slow to change? No, as vendors are allowed to add any extenstion they wish.
> 2. better performance,
Not true. D3D and OpenGL perform very similiar.
> 3. more/better "API" (functionality)
Today, the 2 API's are very similiar. OpenGL used to have more features then D3D back in the early days.
> and better graphics
Again, very similiar.
OpenGL also has a conformance test, guaranteeing that all OpenGL implementations are feature complete, unlike D3D. Does that guarantee speed? No. Drivers are allowed to "fall-back" into software.
>
Thats because Microsoft IS so bull-headed after buying Direct3D from Rendermorphics.
> so now i wonder (like you) if this "open sourcing" of OpenGL give some advantage to OpenGL
It will definately help Mesa. The video card manufactors ALREADY have the OpenGL reference code. They aren't happy having to support 3 API's either... 1) Their own API, 2) OpenGL, and 3) Direct3D
> also i'm looking for some more info about "OpenGL vs. DirectX" issue.
Sorry, you're late to the party. It was over 2 years ago.
> do someone got some URLs?
All this history can be found here...
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/3d.html
Cheers
3D Game Programmer
Let's hope to start seeing more 3d modelers and animation packages on linux. Hell even lightwave6 would be nice but I'd love to see SoftImage (which won't happen, it's a microsoft-owned comapany) or Maya. [Houdini is already there, but this should help them out ALOT!!!]
well..i certainly hope SGI doesnt die out. the real problem with the MIPS chips is that the speed ratings as compared to x86 cpus are pathetic (yes, i know the MIPS stuff is far cleaner and heck, i admin and code on a wide range of all your boxes daily).
The real problem is when you try to sell a 250Mhz MIPS box to a PHB and an NT vendor comes around and says that he can sell a dual 700MHz x86 box for the same price, you *really* have problems convincing anyone to opt for the SGI boxen.
BTW, are you guys hiring anyone ? i'd *love* to work at SGI..even if the company eventually goes under.
Is this really a Good Thing? I mean, let's be unbiased here (just for once). I'll hand it to you that OpenGL is a good step in the right direction. This should make it much easier to get some good games and such ported over.
But we're not just interested in "porting" are we? What we really want is portman. This is why I am proposing a new standard called "OpenNP".
OpenNP is what every open source programmer wants. Direct access to Natalie Portman's low level functions is the stuff of dreams around here. But not only will OpenNP provide direct low-level access... it will also provide a very pretty interface.
I have started a web page for the project. Please go there to volunteer or just check out where the project is headed.
thank you.
With several different groups scrambling to give dedicated OpenGl support for linux, what does this announcement mean for, say, XFree86 or the Nvidia and VA Linux announcent? what about Mesa? Anyone?
Has there been any word from SGI on the possibility of open-sourcing Open Inventor?
He specifically says he is a "deltic" and asks you to forgive the spelling. Some people just *can't* spell, it's no good complaining to them if there's nothing they can do about it. Or did you just not read the sig?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I'd like an explanation of what this means, if anyone can offer it.
As far as I knew 3dfx and NVidia, along with most other 3d cards, worked under linux. All you have to do is get the drivers from your brand's web site.
What does this SGI stuff do that those drivers don't?
You can find more information about this here on SGI's OpenGL Sample Implementation. The frequently asked questions are available here.
The page mentions that this OpenGL implementation will be released under a very open license. They will be using the SGI Free Software License B. Another interesting thing mentioned is that in the long term, the sample implementation and Mesa might merge together. It will be very interesting to see how Mesa will continue to develop.
I'm glad to hear that SGI released this, because OpenGL was one of Linux's weaker points, since Mesa isn't fully OpenGL 1.2 compliant. Way to go SGI!
So, when will I be able to play Quake III on my TNT2???
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+++
NO CARRIER
And, besides, the GPL doesn't give freedom. It takes it away.
:)
*sigh* That old thing again?
Very similar to the USA's Bill of Rights, the GPL makes sure certain things (RMS calls them "freedoms", you call them whatever you want) will always be available. And, like the Bill of Rights, it does that by limiting other things.
Now, it is up to the developer to choose the license they like best. Personally, I prefer the GPL, but I don't get all bent out of shape over it.
Seriously, the GPL is far too limiting.
*shrug* See above. There are those who think the GPL's "limitations" are like the "limitations" that prevent citizens from murdering one another.
If we, as a community, are to be taken seriously, we need to break the notion that all software companies, once they open their source, need to be flooded with responses amounting to, "your license is crap, make it GPL so it's truly free!"
I agree. I also think we need to break the notion that shouting "DIE SOUP NAZI" and going off on a rant about the GPL every time someone suggests it accomplishes anything.
Practice what you preach.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Did you figure in the cost of gigabit ethernet and the switches to go with it? I wouldn't even consider doing a large render on 100bt. For more money you have one single box. Ask pixar why they used 14 sun boxes and not a fleet of cheap PC's.
Well I'm gobsmacked.
Here SGI is giving a hugely valuable piece of code away and doing a great service to the OS cause. So I come on slashdot to check the response, I sort by highest first to see the intelligent comments and what do I see?
Some diatribe by a bitter ex SGI employee the first thing most readers will see. Moderated to a five! I wouldn't have minded if it wasn't all completely baseless opinion. I've worked for SGI for 5 years, I see guys like this come and go. They've were saying MIPS was dead years ago, and the processors still kicks ass. In fact since SGI spun off MIPS last year it's been doing MUCH better than SGI on the stock market.
Please check the relevance or validity of a post to the subject and check the facts in that post before moderating it 5 and makig it the first thing everyone sees when seeking more information. 2 years at SGI doesn't give everyone insight into it's future and the glaring mismatch between the value of MIPS and the claims made it the post should have at least alerted the moderator to the posters obvious bias.
Shame on you slashdot!
the real talent is with the linux coding community and we can do it ourselves.
...we? don't flatter yourself kid. I bet you haven't contributed one single line of code to the community.
we can do it ourselves?
All we need now is the a great big bowl of cocco-puffs and we will be all set.
1) You say OpenGL is crap, so I guess you refer to the OpenGL API, because the implementations differ from board to board.
2) You say Mesa rules, but in fact, Mesa is OpenGL (anyway, it tries to be compatible with it), so you're contradicting yourself. (see 1)
3) "A pc with TNT2 would smoke any sgi machine." Maybe you need to see a SGI in action, they're the best for OpenGL stuff. The whole architecture is way better. (Bus speed is one of the main advantages)
4) The note about orcale, where you compare a p3 with a Sun. What has Sun to do with SGI? They're two totally different companies.
I'd suggest you get your facts straight next time.
DirectX is pretty unsuitable for anything but games - too unstructured. OpenGL, or C++/Java widgets on top of OpenGL, is what all the big-money $20,000 CAD programs use - and the high-end games authors all use OpenGL by preference. With GLX, OpenGl also becomes network-transparent - i.e. I can run 3D software on a remote computer, and is uses the X server running on my local computer for accelerated 3D rendering. This is vital for Professional graphics work, and Engineering CAD.
but
... because of some "politics" 3D accelerated graphics card vendors are prefering iplementing DirectX acceleration and sometimes also add some OpenGL support through DirectX-is-emulating-OpenGL thing (which give not that good performance for OpenGL).
so now i wonder (like you) if this "open sourcing" of OpenGL give some advantage to OpenGL and if it is not alredy too late.
also i'm looking for some more info about "OpenGL vs. DirectX" issue. do someone got some URLs?
hany
I have heard it said, and I will say it myself, Irix is perhaps the BEST operating system in existence right now. Not just best Unix, but best OS period, it's truly what Linux should strive to be. It may be a bit bloated these days (a sign of SGI trying to throw in all the esthetics of Windows and MacOS), but it's still, IMO, the best thing out there.
For those who want customize, I'm running windowmaker as my wm, and have my choice of SGI's cc, CC, make and other tools, or the whole suite of GNU stuff - gcc, g++, gnu make, etc. Truly the best of both worlds.
It is a joy to be a developer on IRIX.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
seti and rc5 rely heavily on FPU performance, meaning you get what you pay for. The Uber expensive SGI box will render images in a fraction of the time a pIII could.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
is the source to you, one person? What improvements could you make? I'd really like to hear. Most people on SGI's concentrate on doing real work, not hacking the source. You want to hack the source? Then run linux or BSD. Each unix has its own purpose and niche.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Extract from an SGI news : --- NVIDIA, SGI and VA Linux to Bring Graphics Standard to Desktop Linux Market Three Companies Collaborate to Deliver First Hardware-Accelerated OpenGL (1.2) Conformant Desktop Graphics for Linux --- Hope that helps,
-- Martial MICHEL
However, I notice that the terms of the release are defined as "Sample Implementation." What does this mean? Is this a less-than-full release? Do we have all of the source, or just part of it?
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
It will be interesting to see what happens to the mesa project.
Will a proven reference implementation from SGI replace a not quite compliant workalike that happens to already have substantial hw acceleration support in the works?
they went to far sure open source things but hell lots of people make money from OpenGL and they might see this as SGI giveing UP
why oh WHY did they not just help mesa out ?
or donate it to Xfree (I'll tell you because SGI make money from OpenGL) I guess they figured that they had tied people in so they could give it away with a "open sourced under an extremely liberal license" and keep these people paying
SGI is a realy nice company why did they do this was helping mesa to hard or ugly ?
the only foot wrong so far !
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I seem to recall that Microsoft spun off Softimage (which it had never really assimilated, and which had remained based in Montreal) some months back.
Basically, the only effect of MS's acquisition of Softimage had been ports of its software to NT, which then started to make inroads into graphics/rendering/animation. Even MS didn't have the clout to abandon SGI support.
A big thank you to SGI for their kernel patches.
Wow, a real Open GL implementation for Linux. And this will be ported to *BSD too. Mesa was great, but it was slow. Xwindows 4.0 will take full advantage of all the improvements this offers.
Once this is in place with any decent card we will be able to do anything graphical as fast or faster than Windows. Linux will have as good a graphics subsystem at that point as BeOS. Move over SGI graphics workstations, Linux is here.
Exciting times lay ahead for all of us graphics junkies. Look for super fast X, great games and best of all, the ablility to write my own great graphics routines and have them be portable across multiple distributions/video cards.
I am thinking that I want to be able to use fog effects for a screen saver... After I haven't used the computer for a while, fog begins drifting across the screen, slowly bluring more and more of the screen as the fog grows heavy. As the screen darkens and swirls a howl peirces the night.
-- Never make a general statement.
You know, I *REALLY* like what IBM and SGI are doing lately. I mean, these companies have their act together. They are taking a higher road that few companies are willing to transverse right now. Despite IBM's shaky history, they really seem to have turned it around (and God bless Blue Labs and everything that has come out of it). SGI is another good example, remember their lawsuit with NVIDIA? Well, rather than carry through with the lawsuit, they decided to work with NVIDIA, and share their technologies instead of bickering over stupid patents and thus ensuring BOTH companies have a bright future not tied up in litigation.
This is the way things should work. Slashdot has been really depressing lately. All the patent infringement and privacy issues that have been wearing down on me, and I've questioned a few times why I continue to read Slashdot (afterall, who wants to spend their day depressed). Every once in a while though, something like this comes along and gives me some hope.
Oh, one last thing while I'm on my podium... I would like to see just a little bit less coverage of these patent infringement/privacy type news posts and get a little more of the science and programming content we used to get. I know this stuff is important, and I don't want to see it go away, but the other content has been a bit barren lately (and what happened to quickies? They come once a month if that now).
Thanks for the hard work and great web site.
I don't mind Microsoft buying allmost everyone one of their applications.
;-)
It's better then Apple having the NIH (Not-Invented-Here) Syndrome.
Nice Link ! I had seen it before, though
And was just as shocked as you !
Cheers
he was probably a MCSE who couldn't find user manager or control panel. I still have an ancient Personal Iris running IRIX 3.3.1 (old!). That might make an interesting box to irc from.
No, you're fired!
The SGI systems are cache coherent so YES you can. When a write happens there is an overhead updating the the other CPU's but the 'locking' is handled automatically and transparently by the architecture, unlike more traditional very large architectures.
An application may choose to implement additional locks, but at least on a single image system the latency is measured in microseconds or less, not milliseconds like a cluster.
Some systems are suitable for a cluster, but only a fool would claim clusters can solve all scalability problems.
So, the word is "No Comments at this time." =]
I know a lot of people are waiting for my "official" response to the SI release. However, I'm still studying the ramifications of the SI license.
I'm hesitant to endorse any code migration between the SI and Mesa code bases until the implications of the licensing are completely clear. The issues of tainting and copyright ownership have to be well understood first.
-Brian
(Hope this doesn't get me in trouble!)
You don't even know what image processing is! That's largely performed on 2D workstations these days. It's already very low end business.
You seem to have forgotten that SGI owns CRAY, it makes the fastest highest bandwidth systems in the world.
The computational markets and the 3D graphics markets are largely treated as separate businesses inside SGI.
I will club to death the next person who says "okay, now maybe DirectX will bite the dust" or anything along those lines. DirectX is the Windows multimedia API. Its propriatory to windows just like the UNIX joystick API, and the UNIX Sound API. Thats how they chose to implement these functions in Windows. DirectX is actually a nice, fast API. D3D on the other hand, is what many people consider to be the bastard child of the DirectX family. Its gotten within of OpenGL, but is I think as tricked out as the inane design will allow, and OpenGL is still getting faster. (hopefully.) So to recap. DirectX is analogous to what the Loki game SDK for Linux. I don't see windows user bitching that Loki GSDK is not available on windows. D3D and OpenGL are the two things usually in contention here. So go ahead, club D3D over the head. It deserves it. But leave the rest of DirectX alone.
BTW> Two points. Quake III uses DirectInput, and Linux NEEDS something like directX. Integrated, low-level, and hardware accelerated. Heaven. (sans 3D API of course.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So that's what OpenGL stands for. I had figured Graphics, but I hadn't even considered "library".
Thanks, now my life is complete. I am prepared to die =)
Well, there are certainly a few warts on OpenGL that in retrospect would have been done differently. Without trying to be inclusive:
I'm sure other people would have different lists. OpenGL is not a perfect API, of course - but we think it's pretty darned good.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
SGIs are indeed very nice for image processing, but that has as much to do with their memory model, graphics hardware, bus speed, and other architecture considerations as the CPU itself. Seti doesn't stress the memory nearly as much as real image processing does and obviously doesn't use graphics hardware so it isn't a good benchmark for real use either.
I don't think SGI is going to loose their grip on the high end of image processing any time soon, but the low end keeps getting better with faster memory busses, better graphics boards and of course faster CPUs. For many purposes, SGIs are a luxury that is increasingly hard to justify.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
...and with an iron fist, at that.
Sun really don't get it. They think that they understand Open Source and are "cleverly" trying to leverage it in their favour and to the (compared with genuine Open Source) detriment of the computing public.
In reality Sun are shooting themselves in the foot, chaining their "open" source with conditions that will scare off the vast majority of potential contributors.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Moderate that question up.. it's pretty key. We already have a really well-written implementation of OpenGL in MESA, lacking only the license fee to get the logo/stamp on it. Can MESA now claim OpenGL compliance? Have they changed the licensing/legaleze of using that mark?
I'm amazed.
That's all there is to it.
For years, SGI has treated GL and then OpenGL as one of the crown jewels. Even the API exposed a lot of their hardware architecture. The source of OpenGL was what made those amazing framebuffers go. Now, to see Kurt Akeley going on about open source and releasing source to Open GL....
As far as I'm concerned, this is definitive proof that SGI has become as much an open source company as Red Hat or VA Linux.
-----
Klactovedestene!
I worked for sgi for a little over 2 yrs. not all that long, but long enough to see the decline of sgi at its during its prime pinnacle.
it was the coolest company I ever worked for. the spirit and atmosphere was unmatched (talking about life on the mtn view campus). I look back at those times with a smile on my face - and a tear in my eye for what it let itself become.
sgi does cool stuff. problem is, they price themselves out of the market and since the market has changed drastically (ie, graphics workstations are now sub-$2k and linux clusters can be built that outperform the o2000 line for a fraction of the price) their business model didn't adapt - so it dies.
I watched the birth and ultimate death of the NT box (called 'wbt', internally; wintel box thing). I saw cray being bought, then attempted to be assimilated, then ultimately thrown away. irix, once a reasonably resilient (albeit somewhat incompatible) version of unix, is essentially dead. the MIPS cpu is essentially dead, with sgi selling its soul to Intel and hoping the merced will save its sorry ass. custom graphics hardware may also be dead at sgi. so what's left? linux??? will sgi attempt to convert from a hardware company that leverages software, to a software-only company?
again, I love sgi and wish them well. but in the last 4 yrs or so, they've demonstrated they know nothing about how to adapt to the New World Order of computing (cost models and such). trying to hang on by rallying behind "the linux thing" is just too little, too late. and there's just not enough profit in it to support the giant that they still are (building- and people-count wise).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."