OpenGL 2.0: Chasing DirectX

MJ writes "Is OpenGL 2.0 All That? Hopefully you will be able to answer that yourself after reading this article from XtremePcCentral. They have cool looking leap frog graphics with lots of arrows and a quote from John Carmack, what else could you ask for? Robert Richmond does a great job of delving into this subject. Carmack says, 'The implementation went very smoothly, but I did run into the limits of their current prototype compiler before the full feature set could be implemented. I like it a lot. I am really looking forward to doing research work with this programming model after the compiler matures a bit. While the shading languages are the most critical aspects, and can be broken out as extensions to current OpenGL, there are a lot of other subtle-but-important things that are addressed in the full OpenGL 2.0 proposal.'"

Comments

Re:problem with opengl

[Chris Burke]

They are cooperating. That's how OGL 2.0 came about. It's an open consortium of componies that decide what the standard should be. They may disagree, but overall it's cooperation.

And the extensions let them expose feature of their hardware that the spec currently doesn't support. That's good for you (who get the features sooner) and good for the company (who can sell their cards based on those features sooner). And the best of those features get folded into the spec next revision. I'm not sure how you can call this a "problem".

It's a lot better than ATI not being able to sell the nicest features of their card because the owner of the software they depend on hasn't put out a release that supports those features yet -- and of course you not being able to -use- those features.

Re:OpenGL 2.0

[runderwo]

Sorry. My humor thread has been deadlocked all day today. :)