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OpenGL 2.0 White Papers
Timothy J. Wood writes "3DLabs has posted a series of white papers on OpenGL 2.0 covering topics such as improving parallelism, timing control, minimizing data movement programmable pixel pack and unpack and (most notably) a proposal for a hardware independent shading language."
It's about time they get a programmable shading language in OpenGL--that is the most lacking feature in my opinion. Probably 90% of the textures used in things like games could be eliminated and replaced with much higher quality shaders that not only get rid of the repeatability of textures, but also *gain* detail as the distance decreases.
Can't wait! Hopefully they'll base it on something already well established, ie. Renderman SL.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
Microsoft, allthough they're a member of the ARB, has > 90% of the desktop market, and is moving forward with a rapid speed towards the heavy workstation market. With this situation comes the fact that DirectX is THE platform to target when it comes to 3D accelerated code.
What's another issue is that Microsoft, up till now, has refused to distribute an updated opengl32.dll with their Operating Systems. The current version is the old OpenGL v1.1 compatible version. SGI has said it has distributed a v1.2 version to Microsoft, but for whatever reason, it's not distributed further to the clients. This widens the gap between a non-uniform OpenGL platform still on v1.1, forcing you to use non-standard stuff like vendor-specific extensions and vendor specific opengl loading on one side and the DirectX API on the other. Without Microsoft's help, OpenGL will never be in the front seat again on Windows systems and because they're gaining a lot of marketshare in the workstation market, also not in that typical OpenGL area.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Honestly, the only really annoying thing about working with OpenGL lately is the headaches that come from pixel/vertex shaders. We certainly need a vendor-independent way to support those, because damned if I'm going to rewrite mine for ATI cards - they'll simply be treated as "not supporting vertex programs".
:)
The synchronisation stuff is pretty handy: certainly, NV_fence has been very useful over the past year or so, and again: vendor-specific paths BAD.
Some of the changes seem to be as much to persuade some-ignorant developers to use OpenGL over D3D - the "black box" aspects of OpenGL are one the more DESIRABLE things about it. Changing those because some D3D guy is saying "I do xyz in D3D and I want the exact same concept to work well in GL because I'm too thick to actually use the right approach for that renderer" seems simply wrong to me.
Uh-oh: UPS just kicked in. Yay mountain storms...
"Pure" OpenGL2 is a terrible mistake. Give vendors the option NOT to support something, and they won't. Then all your old apps+games are up shit creek.
Will finish later when I have stable power again...
Here's a very nice article about the future of OpenGL. It might be easier to read than the full OpenGL 2.0 white papers.
True warriors use the Klingon Google