3D Labs Proposes OpenGL 2.0 To Kick DirectX

furiousgreencloud writes "3Dlabs is trying to drive the graphics interface away from hardware specific extentions, as seen in DirectX. Instead, they are proposing an open (no NDA) dialog on OpenGL 2.0. The guidelines mention good-ol-fashioned platform independence (linux included) and emphasis on programmability, time control and memory managemenmt. They've got a PDF availible for consumption."

Comments

Re:This IS necessary

[Namarrgon]

Indeed. This is one of the things they talk about in the recent OpenGL ARB meeting notes.

nVidia's extensions alone total more than 500 pages, compared to 230 pages for the entire OpenGL 1.3 spec. ATI has their own comprehensive list of extensions, as does SGI and many others. Since there's little natural overlap, each vendor implements similar features in a different way (e.g vertex shaders), and you have to code for each vendor's set of extensions separately. The OpenGL ARB can "ratify" extensions to promote standardization, but you still have to cope with them not being present at all.

This is exactly the problem developers have with DirectX - MS regularly revs the entire API to try and support features from every vendor, so there's an ever-increasing number of ways the underlying hardware differences are exposed, and the number of hardware caps that have to be checked before doing anything is growing rapidly. There are 4 different versions of pixel shaders that a vendor can support in DX 8.1, and the only reason it's not more of a mess is that there's only two chips which support any of them so far (and one of those isn't even available yet).

Regular simplification & unification of all these diverging directions is required. Vendors should of course be able to add innovative extensions, but a core of Really Useful standard features must be maintained & extended, so that hardware vendors have a baseline to target, developers can rely on the features being present, and the lowest common denominator gets steadily pushed higher for everyone.