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Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
srw writes "OpenGL is the industry choice for cross platform, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and it is also the only way you can get fast 3D graphics on your Linux desktop. It now seems Windows Vista implements OpenGL via Direct3D, seriously degrading its performance and attractiveness to developers." From the article: "In practice this means for OpenGL under Aeroglass: OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%, OpenGL on Windows will be fixed at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4, No extensions will be possible to expose future hardware innovations. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision."
Why risk using cross-platform standard while you can tie developers to your platform with Direct3D? It seems that Microsoft has no interest in supporting cross-platform solutions. Why should they?
Yup, just a variation on embrace, extend, extinguish. So what someone needs to due is sue. Of course that may not work either: although Sun got $900M, Java on MS is still broken unless you download Java yourself.
Microsoft is "upgrading" itself out of the marketplace. No serious gamer is going to want to use Vista now. It's turning into same mistake Apple made back in the day - trying to control everything at the expense of flexibility and compatibility. The only thing Microsoft has going for itself is ubiquity - people use it because other people use it. They're chipping away at that foundation with a jackhammer now. This also comes at a time when people are switching to Firefox in droves, with Mac and Linux OSes on the rise. Not a smart move.
I doubt layering OpenGL over directX will make a 50% slowdown; all the time processing is in the GPU and the amount of time spent in an API is insignificant. /.ed
The whole blurb sounds like a scare tactic to me. The article of course is
Does anybody else not believe this at all? I think this was totally blown out of proportion by the opengl guys and the real situation is going to be nothing like this. Of course, nobody on Slashdot is going to read the article anyway and the hyperbole is just going to grow and grow...
Particularly fascinating that with all of the (formerly) core features that MS has been dropping from Vista, they still somehow find time in the development schedule to screw over an open standard like OpenGL.
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I imagine that this is only the case in the Microsoft drivers. It is less effort for them to write a set of DirectX drivers for each graphics card they intend to support and an OpenGL wrapper that can be used with all drivers than write a DirectX and an OpenGL implementation for each card - particularly since DirectX OpenGL wrappers have been around for years.
Vendors like nVidia, ATi and Intel will continue to provide non-wrapped OpenGL drivers, since they will lose sales if their card does 50% worse than a competitor who provides a native implementation.
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MS would be smart to make a EU specfic version again, if only to keep out of the courts.
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windows vista (I preferred longhorn!) is intended by microsoft to be as big an upgrade as win95 was over win3.1, but every time I read news about it, I simply make up my mind more not to buy it
.not running opengl effectively? are they kidding? how many independant software developers ( ms's biggest asset according to steve ballmer), gamers ( the #1 reason windows guys don't completely switch to linux), and researchers are going to be pissed off?
microsoft product designers like to develop software according to idealistic hypothetical usage situations. they assume that all users are happily running directx 9.0,that their video cards are all top notch and a 50% degradation would be nothing for the misguided few who still run GL. heck, maybe it will make them upgrade their dinosaur era hardware!
Linux does exactly the same with Direct3D when you use Wine or Cedega, nothing evil in that, it just makes driver writing easier, since you only have to write one driver and not one for OpenGL and another one for Direct3d. Beside from that I doubt the 50% performance drop, while there might be a drop, most of the work is done on the GPU, so a bit translation from one API into the other should be that bad.
That graphics card/chipset manufacturers provided their own implementations of OpenGL through their drivers anyway. (That's definitely the case for NVidia-based cards at least) Therefore, this would only apply to the system default drivers, which almost no-one will be using anyway.
This is going to be a non-issue for the vast majority of people, and certainly for anyone who cares about 3D performance. Don't let that deny you an opportunity to bash "M$" though.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How is the price of Windows an ethical decision? Particularly when there are viable alternatives to Windows.
What Microsoft is probably doing is revamping their software OpenGL client so that it runs on top of DirectX. This will make software only OpenGL even slower. What it will mean, though, is that in cases where crappy hardware manufacturers release bad (or no) OpenGL drivers, but merely mediocre DirectX drivers, they can use Microsoft's OpenGL drivers to get better performance and quality than they could with their own drivers.
So I suspect that for most people (i.e. those with decent video cards) there won't be any difference. For people with low-end cards, this will probably be an improvement.
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Remember Sun's Java runtime environment. They removed that from the Windows XP distribution, because they wanted to push their own technology, Activex, instead of Applets. Now the same thing is occuring. They want to push DirectX, and they want even more! They want to kill the opponent.
I can't understand why they don't stand fair competition. Oh, my god, monopolies....
Ehm...
Isn't this a bit like going back to the age of Windows 95? That release didn't have an OpenGL driver, but nobody cared. It only came standard in Windows with NT 4, if I'm not mistaken.
But still, if you look at the standard OpenGL implementation in Windows nowadays, you'll notice that it's still basically crap.
"But why does Doom3 run at all", you might ask?
Well: because it's the hardware vendors who provide the driver. A major graphics chip manufacturer can't afford not to have a decent OpenGL driver. So, nobody will care if MS doesn't want to implement a decent driver. Nvidia, ATI & the others will put out a driver, as has always been the case...
So, stop worrying, then!
h357
Microsoft's justification of this is that some 3rd world countries are already antagonistic towards US imports, and selling their OS at costs below domestic prices could be construed as 'product dumping,' which carries a hefty fine and other import restrictions. Not to mention that it's difficult to compete with "nearly free" pirated copies. Whether their fears of dumping and never being able to compete with piracy are justified, I don't know.
Realistically, why worry about this so much? If Microsoft isn't capable of competing in 3rd world countries, then competitors should be able to step in where they slip. Linux, OSX, etc. In fact, it seems that piracy hurts everyone involved.
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If you actually thought about this for at least 5 seconds, you should have seen the simple fact that this is an idiotic approach. The whole idea behind an operating system is to provide a hardware abstraction layer so that games don't need to know whether you have a Soundblaster or a CMI8738 sound chip or whether your videocard is NVIDIA, ATI, or something else. DOS games were a nightmare because of this -- just ask a Gravis UltraSound owner.
Windows XP didn't come with hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers at all. You got a cheap old software renderer. OEM's usually installed the accelerated drivers themselves, or users had to download the driver from the video card manufacturer. Now, with Vista, you still don't get a full OpenGL driver, but you get an OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D, like GLDirect or AltOGL, which is almost as good, but still evil. No doubt, OEM's will still install full OpenGL drivers so that users won't call up asking why Doom 3 performs like crap on their new PC, and everyone who doesn't buy the expensive boxed Windows Vista will be happy with their 3D gaming experience.
Up to 50% slower isn't that bad anyway. "Up to" is just something you say to make your argument sound stronger. Something can be both up to 50% slower and up to 50% faster at the same time. If 50% slower is the worst case, I doubt we can expect the average to be much worse than 20-30% slower, which is pretty impressive for an OpenGL wrapper. Plus, if the wrapper is written well, you can promise that if Direct3D works, OpenGL should work too. I've seen too many instances where a card had good Direct3D support and OpenGL simply crashed the system after so many minutes.
The extremely bad part is, the wrapper will lead some manufacturers to stop supporting OpenGL, so there will be nothing for them to port to Linux. So by embracing OpenGL, while at the same time eliminating the need for driver level support, Microsoft will weaken manufacturer support for OpenGL on Linux. If you're a Windows user, you'll benefit from Microsoft making their wrapper as good as possible to kill manufacturer support. Microsoft has an incentive to not make the wrapper buggy. If you're a Linux user like me, this'll suck ass.
It's entirely Microsoft's fault that OpenGL doesn't work well on Windows to begin with, and it's entirely Microsoft's fault that the "fix" is to screw it in favor of Direct3D, and it's entirely Microsoft's illegal anticompetitive tactics that are driving the decision.
See how it all makes sense now?
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"And one last thing, on OSX they'd have the same problem if they had some sort of alternate 3D api. On windows, 90% of the stuff is D3D, or available in D3D versions."
... it is the graphics card manufacturer's fault? No way. I don't buy that explanation. Like Apple, MS could have chosen to use OpenGL -- in the past, or they could have moved to it eventually. Maybe they have good technical reasons for not doing so, but even if so, it can't be a coincidence that the choice yields a huge bonus for MS: anything that attempts to be multi-platform via OpenGL will have an automatic performance hit, and anything written for the Windows-only D3D api will perform better, and be harder to port elsewhere. To me, it looks more like the usual MS attempt to marginalize anything they don't have control over, and try to lock people into Windows.
Oh, come on. Yeah, of course OSX could have had that problem. So, why doesn't it? Why didn't Apple come up something completely new? Probably because OpenGL already existed, it is something familiar to programmers already, and it helps portability to follow a multi-platform standard.
None of this matters one iota to MS, of course. Instead, maybe it was performance, maybe it was features, but regardless of reasonable reasons, the result was that Microsoft decided to implement their own non-portable interface (Direct3D) rather than go with an open standard. D3D is a single-platform solution, but at least OpenGL is supported as an equal alternative by current versions of Windows.
Now, apparently, everyone is expected to tolerate slower OpenGL performance under the new Windows, because
OSX does all its eye candy without hobbling OpenGL, as do some Linux window managers. Are you saying that with MS's vast resources *and* a couple more years, they couldn't do the same? Maybe supporting a second 3D api (D3D) was a technical mistake in the first place.