OpenGL 4.0 Spec Released

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit, double-precision, floating-point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous-generation GPU hardware."

Comments

Patent problems still there?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Any chance the patent problems of OpenGL 3 have been fixed?

Re:Patent problems still there?

[binarylarry]

It's not really a huge problem in practice.

All the major graphics IHV's provide that extension anyway. It would nice if it was in GL's core spec, but since it's included for any device that matters, it's not a practical concern.

Re:Patent problems still there?

[amorsen]

What makes you assume "software" solutions to technological problems are not patentable in the EU?

It says so right in the law... However, the European Patent Office are able to read between the lines and divine what the lawmakers REALLY meant, so they allow software patents.

So far there is (AFAIK) absolutely zero case law about software patents in the EU, so the courts haven't decided whether EPO's reading is correct. Companies seem content with doing their patent fights in the US. Why bother with dealing with a troublesome case making a precedent in the EU when the defendant is likely selling the exact same software in the US where software patents have been involved in numerous cases?

OpenGL on par with Direct3D11

[Thunderbird2k]

To give an idea to non-OpenGL developers, OpenGL 4.0 closes the feature gap with Direct3D11. If you want to use OpenGL 4.0 you need to wait a couple of weeks before drivers will be out. In case of Nvidia, the drivers will be launched together with their new GTX4*0 GPUs which are the first Nvidia GPUs with Direct3D11/OpenGL 4.0 support. AMD might release new drivers before Nvidia since their hardware is Direct3D11 capable already.

Re:OpenGL on par with Direct3D11

[binarylarry]

What I meant is loading a picture and using it as a texture.

Oh, so how does this even matter from a language/platform/execution standpoint? In the case of loading a texture from disk, you're going to be limited by IO wait anyway, which means even something like Bash would work initiating the transfer and waiting while it's finished.

Interesting. Still, you're going to need to read a model from a file or create its geometry.

Again, you're talking about IO wait, which isn't really limited by your application's execution speed anyway. I'm sure you knew that though, you seem like a very experienced and capable programmer.

Yeah, but I wouldn't advocate Java for 'real time' apps also the kind of geometry processing OpenGL requires. (which is what you'll probably be doing apart from the OpenGL triangle demo)

Your application doesn't usually "process" geometry, in any sane application you just send off a big chunk of data to the server and the OpenGL implementation handles it from there. Regardless, Java is fast, so if you're generating the geometry it's fine anyway. Java lets you use OO development techniques and still get great performance and it works fine for "real time" applications.

Please type 'java floating point' into google and check the first article

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but floating point is fraught with all types of these issues. It's not a data type to be used for any application requiring exact calculations, which is why fixed point alternatives exist.

Besides that, OpenGL is going to mangle your floats and turn them into yet another representation on the GPU server side anyway.

I mean look at SIMD with something like SSE on an x86 chip. It will also *mangle* your floating point values, chomping off lots of data and return skewed values. It's just the nature of floating point.

Re:OpenGL on par with Direct3D11

[TheRaven64]

You seem to have misunderstood how OpenGL is meant to work. It is intended to standardise existing features; that's the entire point. Individual vendors add extensions, developers test them, and the useful ones are added to the next version of the spec.

Re:OpenGL on par with Direct3D11

[bonch]

It literally feels dirty, to go to C/C++ after having worked in Haskell.

Give me a break. C and C++ aren't going anywhere, and barely anybody is using OCaml or Haskell, especially not for OpenGL applications. You sound like another amateur Reddit poster who thinks C is hard because it has pointers. C is simple, fast, and elegant.

In the real world, outside of the buzzword-laden, blog-driven, pseudo-academic world you were spawned, C and C++ remain the dominant languages for commercial application development. That includes Objective-C on the iPhone.

Re:OpenGL on par with Direct3D11

[Forkenhoppen]

This jostling for OpenGL to jump over Direct3D in terms of features is ridiculous.

You can't have stable without the beta.

Re:DOA for anything but pro gear

[Again]

DirectX won, because it does sound and HID input handling, and because its on every PC sold to every mouthbreathing, Best Buy shopping, banana eating customer.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that DirectX won. The xBox 360 is the only current generation console which uses DirectX.

Re:DOA for anything but pro gear

[aristotle-dude]

DirectX won, because it does sound and HID input handling, and because its on every PC sold to every mouthbreathing, Best Buy shopping, banana eating customer.

OpenGL is used on PS3, linux and OS X. It is also used on any game in windows that is cross platform compatible where they did not bother implementing a DirectX engine. Every platform now has HID handling and you can use OpenAL if you want to have the same sound effects engine on windows, OS X and possibly linux.

Now that Valve is porting Steam and related games to OS X and consequently OpenGL, expect to see more activity surrounding OpenGL.

That's not was the Mesa devs say

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

> it's not a practical concern.

According to the references linked from that en.swpat.org page, it seems the developers of the free software Mesa project think it's indeed a practical concern.

Re:That's not was the Mesa devs say

[TheRaven64]

Mesa is used in a lot of X.org drivers. It provides the OpenGL state tracker for Gallium3D, so it will be used a lot more in future.

Re:That's not was the Mesa devs say

[malloc]

Yeah, but anyone using OpenGL with X is going to be using either the Nvidia proprietary drivers or ATI proprietary drivers.

The OSS offerings do not provide nearly the same level of performance, unfortunately.

So again, from a real world practical standpoint, Mesa isn't in use anyway.

Unless you meant to say "OpenGL 3.0" This is absolutely not accurate. Has your "real world" been isolated to workstation CAD and/or heavy gaming users? Those are the only groups where binary non-mesa drivers are used almost universally, but they are a minority. Intel, which has over half the graphics market only uses mesa. Your default Fedora and upcoming Ubuntu 10.4 installs use mesa for both amd and nvidia chips. AMD actively supports the open driver and is working to make that the main driver.

The continued development on gallium points to mesa gaining more traction. I think the trend is for binary drivers to become less and less common in the future.

-Malloc

Re:That's not was the Mesa devs say

[Kjella]

AMD actively supports the open driver and is working to make that the main driver.

They are working on an open driver yes, but they are not looking to replace the proprietary driver in the foreseeable future. For a number of reasons - not least of which is the tons of optimization work going into the main driver - they expect the open source 3D performance to top out at 60-70% of Catalyst by keeping a simple structure. That is much better than than the difference between accelerated and unaccelerated though which can be <1% of the performance.

Re:DOA for anything but pro gear

[TheRaven64]

Added to that, OpenGL ES, which is almost a direct subset of OpenGL (it adds a couple of things, but you can quite easily write code that is both valid OpenGL ES and OpenGL), is present on almost all mobile devices. If you want to write a 3D app or game that runs on a mobile phone, you use OpenGL ES. I think Wince has a DirectX implementation of some kind, but it has such a tiny market share that it's largely irrelevant.

OpenAL is also cross-platform; there's a software-only implementation that runs very nicely on Linux, *BSD, and Solaris; it's not just Windows and OS X. Creative provides OpenAL acceleration on a few other platforms, but I don't think anyone else does - there's not really much point these days in offloading sound processing, CPUs are more than fast enough.

Re:Hardware support

[tepples]

IMO OpenGL is always going to be better unless DirectX becomes more cross-platform friendly

Direct3D is already cross-platform: Windows, Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Phone 7 Series. Among these is the only video game console open to indie development.

Consoles Don't Count?

[medv4380]

Really?

Given that the PC gaming market is really a joke compared to the console market I think DirectX is really rather meaningless.

When the Top 50 selling games world wide contains only 3 PC games The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Starcraft it's time to say that DirectX for the PC is over rated.

Since the Wii and PS3 use a custom modified version of OpenGL for their hardware I'd also have to side with OpenGL as at least being relevant to professional games.

Re:DOA for anything but pro gear

[ultranova]

DirectX won, because it does sound and HID input handling, and because its on every PC sold to every mouthbreathing, Best Buy shopping, banana eating customer.

DirectX is indeed widely used on Windows, since it handles more things. OpenGL handles just graphics, but is cross-platform; with SDL it's close enough to DirectX that it's often used. And of course you could use OpenGL for graphics and DirectX for everything else.

I like the current situation where the two coexist and force each other to evolve to stay competitive. It's a bit like AMD forced Intel to get off its ass and make good and cost-effective processors again. We'll see if NVidia is able to respond to ATI/AMD's challenge too; but at least we won't see similar stagnation as with 3Dfx after initial Voodoo.

The only good thing about capitalism is that competition forces companies to get off their ass and evolve. A pity it doesn't work anywhere except the tech sector.

Only 4.0!

[johno.ie]

DirectX goes all the way to 11.