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OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced
WesternActor writes "The Khronos Group has announced full details for the OpenGL 4.1 specification. Among the new features of the spec, which comes just five months after the release of the 4.0 specification, is full support for OpenGL ES, which simplifies porting between mobile and desktop platforms. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, this new spec has on the graphics industry — more compatibility could change the way many embedded systems are designed. There are lots of other changes and additions in the spec, as well." Reader suraj.sun contributes insight from Ars, which brings OpenGL's competition into focus: "OpenGL 4.0 brought feature parity with Direct3D 11's new features — in particular, compute shaders and tessellation — and with 4.1, the Khronos Group claims that it is surpassing the functionality offered in Microsoft's 3D API. ... Whether this truly constitutes a leapfrogging of Direct3D 11 is not obvious."
Simply put, yes, OpenGL is awesome. The fuss over OpenGL 3.0 was because it wasn't as awesome as it could have been at that time.
It's also available on many more platforms than D3D.
According to these guys Nvidia will have test drivers sometime this week. Since that is also when the spec becomes generally available, it seems safe to assume that the spec was written in fairly close consultation with at least the big graphics players.
I assume AMD's graphics drivers have also been in development, in concert with the spec, for some time, and will be available soonish, albeit with the usual lag after Nvidia. As for the various embedded guys, hard for me to say. I'm sure that having OpenGL ES made a proper subset, as opposed to a somewhat different near-subset, will be attractive for mobile developers, since it will make desktop to phone/console/embedded and back portability easier; but I don't know whether the embedded graphics hardware that is out there now can be updated with just drivers, or whether some 4.0 features will require an upcoming generation of silicon.
As for games, the first tech demo/fanboy wank publicity stunt will probably be available about 15 minutes after the Nvidia drivers. Widespread use might be a while.
The flight simulator Il-2 has the choice of switching between OpenGL or Direct X. In fact, it is also written mostly in Java with much of the graphics in C++. This allowed it to be ported to the console in the form of Wings of Prey. The flexibility of OpenGL allowed this company to port easily, and made them money.
The flight simulator X-Plane (now taking the crown for civilian flight simulators since Microsoft has shut down the studio that produced the Flight Simulator line) uses OpenGL. It's creator says in an interview that the choice of OpenGL was the correct one since he was able to port his product to the iPhone in a matter of weeks. This meant he personally got around 3.5 million US dollars in revenue in around a month. OpenGL made sound business sense to him. Here's the interview with him if you are interested: http://techhaze.com/2010/03/interview-with-x-plane-creator-austin-meyer/
If you want to make money on the iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, Unix workstation visualization, embedded electronics such as FAA approved in-cockpit instruments etc then OpenGL is the correct choice. If OpenGL didn't run on Windows then clearly it would be a bad choice, but the fact is OpenGL works well on Windows *and* just about every other platform too. This includes games.
DirectX may be just as good technically but the fact that it is not portable means it is a non-starter for many applications for both technical and commercial reasons.
Absolutely true and not flamebait: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3.0_controversy
OpenGL 3.0 was a disaster because it should have been revolutionary but instead it was an extended 2.1 to maintain compatibility with workstation apps (as in graphical workstations).
Today however OpenGL is way ahead of Direct3D. One of its killer features is OpenCL compatibility. GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) is now at version 4.00 and since OpenGL 3.2 supported geometry shaders.
Now is it relevant? Are you kidding me? In this day and age of all these platforms it is _THE_ library. Direct3D is only viable on Micrsoft platforms.
Android, Playstation3, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, Windows. They all have OpenGL support and thus anyone is now porting, if they haven't already and newcommers all use OpenGL. In fact all the CAD apps have been using OpenGL solely! All the big players and studios are using OpenGL now.
Now the real question is; What is Microsofts next move to stay in the game?
Here be signatures
``But lets be honest. Sound in Linux has always been a cluster fornication.''
I don't know, man. OSS always worked for me. Then came ESD, which worked on top of OSS but allowed multiple applications to play sounds at the same time. I actually fell from my chair the first time that happened. I had never heard that before. It didn't happen on Windows at the time, despite Windows being king then. Clusterfornication? I wouldn't say so.
Then we got ALSA. I never really understood the point of that. Eventually, free OSS drivers stopped being available for my hardware, but ALSA drivers were available, so I switched. It worked, although a few applications I used needed configuration changes, because they tried to use OSS and failed, ALSA's OSS emulation notwithstanding. I understand other people's experience with ALSA hasn't been as good, but I suspect that has something to do with them switching years before I did.
There have been several other audio systems that I never understood the point of and never used. And then came PulseAudio. What on Earth happened there? Seriously. One day, I was sitting happily thinking how Linux distros had matured so much over the years, and then suddenly, millions of computers went silent, and a million voices cried out in pain and frustration. I don't know what benefits PulseAudio has, but it's clear that somebody screwed up by mass-deploying it when it clearly didn't work reliably yet. I actually think that this debacle has single-handedly reduced the reputation of sound on Linux from "it works, as long as your hardware is supported, which it generally is" to "you are lucky if it works at all, and even luckier if it still works tomorrow". Congratulations, that was quite an accomplishment.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.