Slashdot Mirror
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."
Read this post for an explanation of why this problem is NOT as bad as people are making it out to be.
Now that Microsoft have cancelled all the planned new features for Vista, the only thing left for them to remove is stuff that works fine in current versions of Windows.
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.
WinXP SP3 - Now with fewer features and less compatibility than ever!
MS would be smart to make a EU specfic version again, if only to keep out of the courts.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
You do realise that most if not all graphics card/chipset manufacturers provide their own implementations of OpenGL with their drivers, don't you? That this is only going to apply to the system default drivers that no-one who cares in the least about performance is going to be using?
European governments are starting to wise up that transfering as much as 0.3% of GDP to the United States in Windows licenses is not a smart move.
Can you give any references for that figure please? According to the CIA world factbook, our GDP is $ 1,782,000,000,000 - are you really suggesting that we spend more than $5,300,000,000 on Windows licences? According to computerworld, MS's revenue for 2004 (total, not just for Windows) was $36.8 billion; that would mean (according to your figures) that the UK was providing well in excess of 14% of MS's revenue...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
0.3% of GDP on Windows licences! Are you having a proverbial "laugh"?
UK GDP - source Google - $ 1,782,000,000,000
0.3% of UK GDP = $5,346,000,000 or $5.4bn
I'm sure the UK spends a lot on Windows. But bear in mind that Microsoft's total annual revenues are only about $40bn, of which roughly half is client (Windows XP, etc.) and server (Windows 2003 Server). (In fact this over-states total Windows licenses, as there is also SQL Server, etc. in there.) But even on a best case, you're saying that the UK buys more than a quarter of all Microsoft Windows licenses. In fact, what you're really doing is making up sprurious statistics to get some temporary kudos.
Next item of absurdity: "the United Kingdom spends 0.3% of GDP on it's transport infrastructure". Really? Source please. Of course there is no source, because this is a ridiculous made up number. Lets go to the UK Office of National Statistics: oh! it turns out that the UK government (excluding what is spent by private industry) spends, da da, £20bn on transport infrastructure. (Which, at today's exchange rate is about $35bn, or around 2% of GDP.)
Congratulations, you made up some numbers and now will be modded all the way back down to -1, troll.
Goodnight.
--- My dad's political betting
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
No, it's not FUD. This announcement and call for action was made by the IHVs (3D Labs, ATI, and NVIDIA) at the OpenGL BOF at SIGGRAPH. If you install a hardware vendor's OpenGL ICD, the Aeroglass compositing desktop will be switched off. So, for users that want to run the Aeroglass desktop, that means you're stuck with Microsoft's generic OpenGL 1.4 implementation.
I understand that the article is slashdotted, so your mistake is forgivable. Here are the facts: MS is making vendor-supplied OpenGL implementations second-class citizens in Vista. When you use one, all the new graphics features they are including in Vista will be switched off. Users won't take kindly to your program disabling eyecandy across their entire desktop. This means that people must choose between using Microsoft's OpenGL supplied with Windows (which has always been and continues to be crappy, especially now that it will be layered on top of DirectX), or having their users hate them, or switching to DirectX. The people calling for action are the likes of ATI, NVidia, and 3DLabs, not just some random MS bashers.
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