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."

Comments

Meeting minutes

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Also of interest is the meeting minutes where the opengl panel discuss the implications of this leap, and raise some interesting questions:

> Bimal: Devil's Advocacy question: why do we want OpenGL to survive? If IHVs can't articulate this and drive progress, it won't survive.

I'd be really sad to see OpenGL go. Its the only way I've been able to fart around with all that graphic lovelness since University, doing my bit with deformable objects.

I hope they get their finger out and pull it off. Apple should be helping to sponsor this sort of thing really IMHO...

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

OpenGL is unlikely to go - after all, DirectX only exists on Wintel/XBox. Scientific and industrial visualisation applications are pretty much all OpenGL, and are pretty much all designed for Unix and Linux (there are rickety ports to WNT from Unix), and depend on the design for high-poly-count and easy C and FORTRAN compatibility of OpenGL. The fancy-texturing facilities of DirectX are largely irrelevant, and the requirement to use C++ or (bleurgh!) a COM interface in other languages, makes it difficult to use DirectX for anything "serious".

The margins for software and hardware vendors in this market are much larger, and more secure, than in the games software market (where most products barely break even) - you can get away with charging £20000 a year for a license to many specialised programs.

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

(a) mainframes are still around. If anything they're experiencing massive growth, thanks to IBM remarketing them as ultra-reliable linux virtual server solutions.

(b) As a mechanical engineer and computational fluid dynamicist, I assure you, the workstations are not "dominated by windows" - most people are still on SGIs, and the majority of those that aren't are moving to Linux, not Windows NT, under the advice of the application vendors, who find supporting their apps on linux much less of a pain than on WinNT.

Unix Clusters aren't going away either. Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do. Depending on the application, there's a spectrum of cost/performance solutions that may be worthwhile - if you're simulating a nuclear explosion, and CPUs get more powerful, you don't necessarily downsize, you might make the simulation more accurate by using roughly the same amount of computers to do much more. Human's AREN'T able to simulate the physical world with complete accuracy - but the more calculations, the better (assuming perfect programming), at least until you hit quantum limits, and then it takes EVEN MORE power to do probabilistic predictions via monte-carlo or sum-over-histories....

What about..

[nervlord1]

I really wish an open source group would release some sort of sound-graphics-animation libary for windows that directly competes with direct X. why would it rock? Simple porting of windows games to linux One less area Microsoft has a stranglehold on Games development would be easier for open source programmers A good games libary for linux Wed already have 3d and Direct 3d covered with open gl, we just gotta get the rest of the stuff covered. But IMO i think this might happen sooner than you think, it is my firm belif that once the Xbox gains motion ms will drop support of Direct X on the pc in order to convince PC games developers to come develop for its Xbox. It would make alot of business sense to do that. YMMV

Re:What about..

[Captain Pedantic]

Something like SDL you mean?

Re:What about..

[jonathan_ingram]

*S*imple *D*irectmedia *L*ayer

It's a very low level media abstraction library, together with a lot of small extensions which add support for image processing, truetype fonts, sound mixing, etc.

http://www.libsdl.org/libraries.html
shows what extension libraries to SDL exist.

Re:What about..

[DGolden]

Simple Directmedia Layer. It, and associated add-on SDL_* libraries, provide simple, easy to understand and use, pure C APIs to the basics a game developer would want. It handles input/output, and acts as a gate to OpenGL for 3D.

(from SDLsite:)

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.


Pretty much all commercial games on linux use SDL, as well as most new little games on linux, and a fair proportion of them on windows and MacOS

See here for more details.

Re:What about..

[Junks Jerzey]

Something like SDL you mean?

SDL is a 2D frame buffer and blitting library for the most part (to be pedantic, it also includes input, CD, and minimal sound libraries). The 3D side of SDL is just OpenGL. So if OpenGL goes away, so do 3D graphics in SDL.

Shading Language

[bribecka]

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.

Way too late.

[Otis_INF]

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.

Re:Way too late.

[Mike Connell]

Not really. Most people using windows for 3d graphics in the workstation area are using a high end graphics card. By that I mean GeForce3 or faster.

They all come with OpenGL drivers. You dont even notice that MS doesn't ship them. Install video cards drivers, get OpenGL.

MS is really in a position to lose market here to Linux because of this: Linux on a PC with fast 3d (via nvidia for example) is infinitely more like the workstation being replaced than NT on a PC is.

At the higher workstation end (higher than GeForce3), people aren't yet looking at windows because the hardware isn't there anyway.

I think it'll be a while before OpenGL dies, especially as in all markets people are finally moving up the ladder - to scenegraph API's like this one.

If the SG supports both DX and OGL backends then you dont even have to think about it.

my random 0.02,
Mike

Re:Way too late.

[praedor]

Hrmmm. Apple is up and coming (again) with its nice PPCs and MacOS X (UNIX!). This and the fact that even MacOS 9 doesn't use Direct X means that software that goes out there for Macs and PCs, and seeks to stick with the growing (again) Apple market will have to stick with OpenGL. Mac doesn't do DirectX (thank GAWD!).

Many still do lots of graphics stuff on Macs, this means OpenGL. Games on Macs will have to be OpenGL.

Fortunately, since there is but a relatively minor difference between MacOS X and Linux/*BSD, support for Macs means easier time getting support for Linux/*BSD in this area. DirectX is not and has not killed OpenGL. It cannot.

In a nutshell: OpenGL2 good; "Pure" OpenGL bad

[arQon]

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...

The future of OpenGL article

[codexus]

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.

Humm...

[GISboy]

Some of the propisitions are good, but I fail to see how it will help.

Let me explain, and ignore the hardware issues to some extent:
Looking back at a summary of 3d api's:
Glide: Wickedly fast , easy to write for, obsessivly propritary (IIRC) a la 3dfx.

OpenGL: Fast (glide speed on compliant/correct hardware), moderatly hard to write for initially but easier as time goes by. Open/closed? I honestly forget. Was it documented API's and closed source?

DirectX: Humm. Used to be "Dog ass slow". Moderatly fast, maybe medium speed, very compatible, used to be (maybe still is) hard as hell to write for (this may have changed).
Eventually, If memory recalls correctly, absorbed the "better aspects" of other 3d api's, but also added another degree of difficulty/confusion to implementation.

Now, realize I base this off of my: gaming, memory (oops) and discussion of merits I've read/heard/been privy to.

I'll focus on gaming because that is where the rubber meets the road (or where the 'trons hit the tube).

OpenGL: Quake/GLquake (...or was it GLquack? heh)
Even the "software" mode went from Impressive and Eye opening, but GLquake put the "am" in {higher octave in voice} 'Daaaaaaaammmmmnn'.
Fast and pretty (for its day).

Glide: Quake2, software vs Glide mode. No debate until you can pick your jaw off the floor and keep your mouth closed for more than 5 seconds.
(and stop drooling on my keyboard, dammit).
Glide was the...damn, what is the word?...pinnacle, saviour, "schwing" that low, med end hardware needed to be 'high endish'.
(example: friend of min playing tomb raider on a G3 333...Showed him TR on a p200 w/V2...'fuck you, man' was the response {seg})

DirectX...Thief: Glide vs DX{murmph-snort-bwahahahaha}...Hummmm: 30 fps in glide, .3 in directX? on the same hardware.
Nowadays, the software has improved incrementally, but the hardware by leaps and bounds...making the s/w look good. Humm.
Sort of the reverse of Glide--software made the h/w shine--here it is the other way around.

I think OpenGL is trying to bring back the "make the hardware shine" days back.

Good luck, because if I understand the way DX is now...it has "absorbed" the api's of GL and Glide and whatever company made the software in the first place (damned if I can find the link...british company I believe).

Well, I've blathered on long enough. Not bashing, just offering my opinion and what I saw and heard in a nutshell.

The eyes don't lie...that is the lips job. :\

Cheers.

SDL is just that...

[Tord]

I know others have allready said this but as a former game developer, with more than 6 years of professional experience, I just want to add some weight to the argument that SDL indeed is what you are asking for.

I've never used SDL professionally (I've used Direct-X, Glide, PlayStation specific API's and some old inhouse stuff for DOS), but I've toyed around with it in my sparetime and I would have no trouble trusting it as the foundation for a high-quality cross-platform game (both 2D and 3D). In fact, I would rather use it than Direct-X since I find the API simpler and more straight forward as long as I don't need some obscure Direct-X feature for performance reasons (most games don't).

The URL is www.libsdl.org if you want to check it out.

Calling John Carmack!

[DG]

Hey John, have you seen this spec yet?

What do you think?

DG

Fahrenheit

[codework]

I'm just please that OpenGL is progressing to the next level, especially after the Fahrenheit fiasco. It's my belief that MS used it to distract SGI/ARB from OpenGL to progress DirectX unhindered. And look at market place now, nearly 100% DirectX penetration if we're talking games, and even near that for typical workstation/cad style products that OpenGL considered it's home market.

Don't get me wrong though. I Love OpenGL. Not only do I consider it the _only_ 3d api, I consider it one of the most professional and designed APIs. It's how an API should be designed.

Perpixel shading is a very welcome addition and should save some texture memory. Imaging all the Q3 shaders implemented in hardware... yum.. And I'm sure you could implement some nice trees with it too..

Although all these nice additions to an API won't stop inventive programming. There will still be a need for billboard trees and highlights..

Even so, the additions to the api will create even more ingenious implementations. Lionheads use of mipmapping for bluring distant objects was ingenious. Look at how far ModeX pushed the pc, or how Mode7 pushed the Nes. With a more powerful API the possibilities appear endless

Unfortunately I don't see drivers appearing for a long time..

-J

I hate being the voice of reason...

[Mongoose]

I'd like to inform everyone in these groups:

a) OpenGL is dead!

b) OpenGL is out of date

c) Let's ditch OpenGL and do DirectX

DirectX isn't the same thing as OpenGL, however you can compare D3D and OpenGL. DirectX is for sound, input, and rendering not just rendering, kids.

OpenGL will outlive D3D, since it's what big iron and the 'professionals' use for high end graphics. Also hardware vendors produce GL extentions way before D3D work has even started. GL can use extentions made *after it's release to support more features quickly and easily. ( If you're in one of these camps you never done 3d development, or think all computers are consumer PCs. )

Also if you use DirectX, you're limiting yourself needlessly. If you want the "latest and greatest" , then you're not going to use an API that has no modular extention system to support hw/ideas made after the API release. OpenGL can support hw/algorthims that happened *after it's release. OpenGL also runs on manchines a lot more powerful than your pentium 4 you bought at comp usa.

If OpenGL goes away?

[roystgnr]

And if C goes away, then SDL is completely useless!