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OpenGL 3.0 Released, Developers Furious
ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"
Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"
Probably not. As long as DX remains solely in the hands of MicroSoft; there will be use for other forms of cross-platform 3D. More so as the "none-MS" OSes continue to grow in numbers.
The Long Now Foundation
Jumping ship to DX10 would be nice, if it were cross-platform. (No, Xbox + PC does not count as "cross-platform".)
Unfortunately for those of us on Linux/Mac, a lot of Windows developers don't care.
Unfortunately for those of you who think you don't care about this, consider that porting an app generally improves it, and can shake out bugs which aren't as apparent on the other platform -- which means potentially less reliable games, even if you're only on Windows.
And unfortunately for those of us who hate Vista, that's kind of a requirement for DirectX 10. At least with OpenGL, those in charge have no agenda to push Vista -- so an OpenGL 3.0 game should run on XP, if it runs on anything.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"The library needs to be able to interoperate with current and future video hardware, so that all hardware acceleration features will be available to applications using the 3D library..."
Now, I know next to nothing about the nitty-gritty details of OpenGL or DirectX,
but I really thought they were pretty much equal (in terms of being able to fully utilise the hardware)
I was under the impression that MS wrote the DirectX API, and graphics hardware was expected to provide in interface to GPU operations as per MS's API spec
On the flip side, OpenGL being less centrally controlled,
instead graphics hardware provide their own API calls for new GPU operations, and provide this new API call to OpenGL via it's "extension" interface
and every so often, the OpenGL spec would be updated, with new GPU functions (currently using seperate, per-vendor extensions) would be standardised into a single implementation
Are developers really saying that OpenGL cannot do things DirectX can?
I thought as long as (say) Nvidia kept provided drivers, and software kept querying for the hardware's capabilities, DirectX & OpenGL were pretty much on a par with each other....
Can anyone provide a semi-layman's explanation?
If you're talking about forking OpenGL... how do you convince Nvidia, AMD, Intel, PowerVR, Apple, Microsoft and who knows how many other companies to implement your incompatible version of the API in their OpenGL stacks?
However if you're simply talking about GLX/Mesa then you'll be happy to know that it's being reimplemented in the Gallium3D project.
You don't fork a spec. You create a new one and try to get it accepted by the industry (ATI, Nvidia and Intel in this case).
Good luck with that.
Professional apps (CAD/simulators/visualizations...) make up the majority of the OpenGL market and they have to be supported for decades (no, military or airlines do not buy a new training system every two years ...)
So breaking compatibility is deal breaker. This is exactly what OpenGL 3.0 is about. I am developing OpenGL applications for a decade now and all are still running and being used. How many 10 year old games can you actually get working today? God forbid - on Vista? That is the difference.
Also, the "newest features not supported by OpenGL" - how many "newest features" are your typical games actually using? Perhaps one or two and they are optional, because the game must run even on not bleeding-edge hardware (how many games are DX10-only? - commercial suicide ...)
So to wrap this up - the title is EXTREMELY misleading and making up a storm where one doesn't exist.
That would have been back in the mid to late 1990's. The Indy's (those flattish sparkly blue workstations) were the first to have a software implementation of OpenGL.
OpenGL was designed primarily so that third party graphics card manufacturers could write device drivers compatibile with the CAD and scientific-visualisation markets. The developers didn't really care much about 3D sound, real-time physics engines or AI. All they needed was a GUI and one or more hardware accelerated 3D graphics contexts for applications to run. The most complicated lighting models at the time were smooth shaded textures geometry using point light sources.
Now, modern game engines will be using multiple vertex and fragment shaders for things like relief mapping, occlusion mapping, reflection, refraction, BRDF, BTF, spherical harmonics, environment mapping, ambient shadow-mapping, real-time radiance, particle systems animated using textures and feed-back loops. Current research is attempting to include Computation Fluid Dynamics for animating dust around racing cars (EA), the use of Partial Differential Equations to synthesize the spots, stripes and spirals for virtual creatures (Spore), and that's just the visual part of the game. Then there is 3D surround sound, the physics (collision detection between animated characters, their environment, and everything else), along with multi-player network support (sockets).
To make a PC game that sells, it is going to have the visual appeal that takes the graphics hardware to its full potential. This means having people experienced in all of these fields or having the budget to afford middleware. Only large companies can really do this now.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
While the gaming community is growing at an awesome rate, I doubt its the same size, and definitely not bigger than the hollywood industry. Coming from the special effects/render farm industry, I can tell you that every single movie that makes it to the big screen today, is in one way or many, made with products that use OpenGL. The gaming community/developers of course are frustrated that opengl is not dx10, but lets face it, hollywood has an endless budget, and a lot of say. This story does not surprise me, and opengl is still going to be the best cross-platform solution for many (and most) 3d technologies, less gaming.
Plenty of people are buying computers with Vista and switching to another OS, or downgrading to XP.
I wouldn't call it a downgrade.
Does that count the people who've pirated Vista and run it?
I've always found it sad that people have to bandwagon things like operating systems. I mean, take Irix for example. It's possibly the worst, most unstable operating system in history (through its lifetime) and I had to suffer with it for years, but you don't read about people bashing it because it's *nix. I don't care too much about Vista. I don't care too much about any flavor of *nix either. It's all a toolbox and people pretending otherwise have agendas that range from personal to political and monetary issues. Now I must admit I have a proclivity for laughing at Windows ME (how'd that ever get released? LOL)
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I wouldn't call it a downgrade.
Perhaps a "retrograde to XP"? Sounds kinda hip.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
You know, I hear this a lot, but I think you're wrong, at least in this case. Or to put it more succinctly, the plural of anecdote may not be data, but the collective of anecdote is indeed data. If every user Enderandrew knows, and every user I know, and...
I mean, how many times do you have to hear the exact same story from how many different people before you admit it's the truth? I don't know one single person who is using Vista as their home OS. Zero. Nada. None. And I work in end-user support. I talk to lots of people. It's my job. And seriously, not one. I know some people who had it for a while, and ditched it for either XP or (yes, seriously) Ubuntu Linux.
I spend a fair bit of time in hipster coffee shops (don't judge me, it's part of my job), the patrons of which I take as a fairly good bellwether of consumer tech, if only because there's a decent amount of disposable income floating around and a majority of the machines in use at such places tend to be 1 year old (yeah, lots of Macs, but even so...) And there is no way I'm going to believe that Vista is at a 20% adaptation rate, at least not in this major Midwesten metropolitan area. Absolutely not.
-p.
PS: It's 3:00 AM central time, and I have been drinking. If something up there doesn't make sense or sounds stupid, please ask me to clarify rather than modding me down. I don't usually drink and post, officer, honest :)
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!