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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?"
WINE's Direct3D sits on top of native linux OpenGL.
I don't think most developers are "furious". When OpenGL 3.0 was described as a backward-incompatible rewrite, they were a bit closer to furious. They spoke, and said they wanted backward compatibility retained a while longer. And lo, Khronos delivered, while providing a mechanism for migration to the new architectural constructs (buffer objects, shaders, moar buffer objects, moar shaders), and a way to build your code so that deprecated constructs fail.
Seriously, most people in the OpenGL community are fairly happy (though there's some grumbling over the still-wide OpenGL / OpenGL ES split).
jump ship to DX10
And when they do they wander into Direct/Input/Sound/Video/Play/etc. OpenGL does 3D rendering. The rest? Cobble it together from whatever other obsolete scraps are available.
The non-Microsoft "stacks" suck. Bottom line.
The concept of a 2D "layer" still hasn't impinged on the basic SDL API. Couldn't believe it when I learned that.
I guess professional game developers don't care that Microsoft owns the machinery of their livelihoods. They sure aren't contributing to their own independence in any noticeable way.
Heh - Games developers may have that luxury, but 3D/GC vendors certainly don't. So unless someone decides to port DX10 to OSX (*snort*) or Linux (sing it with me now: "render farms!"), OpenGL will continue to have a decently-sized userbase for a very long time.
IMHO, anyone making the claim that they're going to suddenly jump to DX10 is only making noise; nobody is dumb enough to cut off the fastest-growing consumer market sectors.
(...besides, doesn't the PS3 use OGL, or do they use some other home-brewed library set? Not sure there...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That certainly isn't my experience. Most people on the OGL discussion boards were very much looking forward to the changes to the API. The previews Khronos posted in the Pipeline newsletter looked bloody amazing.
But when those previews are followed by almost a year of complete silence and then finally an API which is nothing at all like the one they promised, but rather some more spit and polish on the mess that is OGL 2.1 (much like OGL 2.0 was really just 1.6 with a new name), people got pissed off. And rightfully so.
The only ones pleased with this change as far as I've been able to gather are the CAD people wanting to continue to run their old, stale OpenGL bases code until the end of time. For new development, using OpenGL is a pain in the back side, which is why I just began bringing my renderer up in D3D10.
Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?
it isnt. because OpenGL ARB is gonna play it nice, and revise their specs, therefore pleasing developers and therefore GAMERS as much as they can, and fix the matter, wont you now ? dont make us wait.
Read radical news here
This has however everything to with ATI and nothing really with OpenGL, as it is the hardware manufacturer who ultimately decides which capabilities will they expose in the drivers. ATI's OpenGL drivers was *always* bad, buggy, and badly performing (go on, search for some old benchmarks, you will see that ATI cards that easily outperform their NVidia counterparts in DirectX falls heavily behind when it comes to OpenGL apps and games).
The developers' expectations here was that if OpenGL 3.0 will include all the newest stuff in core spec, ATI (and Intel and others) will be forced to support them (so they can pass the certification and be able to call their products compliant), however the same expectation for improved OpenGL drivers was there when ATI was bought by AMD, and that too never really materialized. ATI simply doesn't care enough about OpenGL, their main focus was always DirectX, and i don't see that changing in nearby future.
As for OpenGL 3.0, the rage is that Khronos group promised us moisty delicious cake (whole new API, yay!), but after long long wait delivered only small biscuit. I didn't expect much so i'm not disappointed and overall the spec is good step (deprecation model for lots of old stuff, FBO finally promoted to core, direct access extension), but just like KDE 4.0, it is only first step, and it *really* depends on where it will go from now.
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
Imagine you were the owner of a CAD or Animation software company. I suppose that when you have multiple OpenGL apps each with 10s of millions of lines of code, it's pretty hard to justify a rewrite from a business standpoint. Those "old stale" code bases each generate 100s of millions of dollars each year, and they're orders of magnitude larger and more complex than games. It would take millions of $$ to port one of the major OpenGl apps to another API, and from a business standpoint, those $$ would be wasted -- they wouldn't be doing anything other than chasing someone else's aims and objectives -- not doing anything that would generate a decent return on the investment.
Your customers don't care what the underlying API is that you use -- what they care is that you solve their problems in a cost effective way. If OpenGL3.x was a complete and incompatible break -- these companies would think "well if those a$$h0les are going to make us rewrite the software, we might as well jump to DX instead and be done with it" (At least if you don't have to support mac and linux).
It's not too hard for people to figure out who I work for so let me add that these are my opinions only -- my employer may share them, or they may not -- I certainly make no representations in this -- but these opinions are mine.
Ian Ameline
most likely for a very long time to come as well
Seems rather FUDy... Why introduce a deprecation model if not to encourage people to the more OpenGL ES like nondeprecated bits? Yeah, you still can call glBegin/End, but it'll presumably hiss nastily at you.
I just don't see it as "layered on top", particularly - you do things the new way if you want your code to run in forward-compat mode. It's "beside" rather than "on top".
(certainly unlikely to be "layered on top" at the driver sources level, would be inverted if anything - any old fixed pipeline functionality emulated with programmable hardware.)
Bit of a book-scam though. Whole 'nother round of red/orange book purchases...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The problem here isn't the actual implementation of the old fixed function pipeline. That has been emulated with shaders for yonks already.
The problem lies in the state machine at the core of OpenGL. This will have to be there no matter what "deprecation level" you're running at and I can't imagine the IHVs will implement a standalone version of that for each of these levels. The result is that every feature will impact others since they interact with the same core system, enabled or not. IHVs will have to hack up their currently stable code to add OGL "3" support, and they will break things in the process.
What really breaks my heart is that OGL2 could "easily" be layered on top of the original GL3 they proposed. That way they could take care of backwards compatibility while still providing lean and mean drivers for the rest of us. The other way around isn't nearly as easy though (if at all possible), and will do jack squat for driver simplicity.