Slashdot Mirror
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
Screaming Lunatic writes "John Carmack has decided to write an OpenGL2.0 rendering path for Doom3. You can read his .plan or you can finger him. This will be huge for the development of OpenGL2.0. Video cards are typically benchmarked with respect to the framerate when running Quake3. Future benchmarks will be based on Doom3. This means IHVs will be somewhat forced to write good OpenGL2.0 implementations."
That could make the difference between life and death for Open GL in the face of Direct X etc. Thankyou ID, even if I don't like your games!
Well firstoff I'd like to commend Carmack on his choice to utilize the new OpenGL extensions -- I think this is the absolute best thing for graphic cards to be focusing on. It levels the playing field and doesn't favour certain chipset manufacturers with propietary extensions.
:)
Also, what are the (linux ported) open sourced applications (read: games) which use OpenGL for rendering?
Are they common? Would this possibly mean that a future port of Doom3 would be (more) easily done once the game is finished?
Also, does anyone know if there will be a supported version of Doom3 for Linux, or will we be relying on ported versions? If the latter is true, didn't Loki games file for Ch. 11? If they did, what is the likely hood of another company/group making the transistion. By the time Doom3 comes out I'll prolly buy a brand new system, and if I could throw linux on that brand new hardware and still play Doom3, well heck - that would be peachy
dmarien
This is really great news. This was one area where OpenGL was under threat of being overrun by Direct3D and/or proprietary, vendor specific extensions.
In recent months I have become worried that OpenGL 2.0 would be dead in the water as a standard, because progress seemed slow. I was wondering whether we would ever see OpenGL 2.0 as an accepted standard. Now that is far more likely. This is definately a Good Thing as far as standards are concerned. Nice one, Mr. Carmack!
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Is the Doom3 test been released about a month or maybe two weeks before the windows test.
In previous releases idsoftware has released test versions of their games before the full release, in order to do some beta testing.
If they decide to release a linux version of Doom3, and given Carmack's good attitude towards open source and OpenGL, I really really would love if they go and piss off Mr Gates by releasing the test for Linux first.
I bet that a zillion gamers would install Linux just to be able to test Doom3. They have been waiting for years!!
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
If there was any doubt of it before, this finally proves it: John Carmack, You Da Man!
I've been reading the OpenGL 2.0 whitepaper and it has a lot of things I like. Let's just hope that 3DLabs, et al. will finish with it soon.
It was. But like even in quake 3 they had the decapitated heads of Id employees scattered about.
That was where much of the Linux Mesa and OpenGL work, especially the hardware stuff, was collected. I remember seeing a while back that they had laid off a bunch of workers, including Brian Paul. The Precision Insight URL no longer responds, but a quick Google shows Mesa work ongoing, and Brian Paul now at Tungsten Graphics doing largely the same type of stuff he's been doing all along.
Maybe there's hope of OpenGL 2 for Linux, after all. Next will be pursuading Carmack et al not to use Microsoft lock-in compilers.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Didn't MS buy OpenGL patents from SGI recently?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
New game engines from id are Big Deals in the game industry. These are what most people benchmark on, these are what people can't wait to get their hands on, these outsell anything claiming to be competition. It's make-or-break for video card companies. If their cards are shown to be poor performers compared to the brands that did race to upgrade GL support, their sales will plumit while the others escalate.
A new game engine from id does not mean just one game. They license their game engines out to many companies, and from there many games are made. ...Maybe even "a dozen or so", enough to make any video card makers that handn't already... take notice.
From reading various bits of info on the web, there seem to be four different code paths. An nVidia codepath, an ATI codepath, a default codepath, and now the OpenGL2.0 codepath.
So Matrox and 3DLabs pretty much have to put out OpenGL2.0 drivers to run Doom3 or they can implement nVidia/ATI OpenGL1.3 extensions. But the interesting case is the nVidia codepath.
The Geforce3/4 has 4 texture units. The Radeon8500 has 6 texture units. You would have to assume that the next line of nVidia cards would have more texture units. To take advantage of the extra texture units, it would seem that nVidia would have to write OpenGL2.0 drivers. This is definitely a good thing.