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Intel Supports OpenGL ES 3.0 On Linux Before Windows
An anonymous reader writes "The Khronos Group has published the first products that are officially conformant to OpenGL ES 3.0. On that list is the Intel Ivy Bridge processors with integrated graphics, which support OpenGL ES 3.0 on open-source Linux Mesa. This is the best timing yet for Intel's open-source team to support a new OpenGL standard — the standard is just six months old whereas it took years for them to support OpenGL ES 2.0. There's also no OpenGL ES 3.0 Intel Windows driver yet that's conformant. Intel also had a faster turn-around time than NVIDIA and AMD with the only other hardware on the list being Qualcomm and PowerVR hardware. OpenGL ES 3.0 works with Intel Ivy Bridge when using the Linux 3.6 kernel and the soon-to-be-out Mesa 9.1."
Phoronix ran a rundown of what OpenGL ES 3.0 brings back in August.
OpenGL ES is a cut-down version of OpenGL aimed at mobile and embedded. Windows has never supported any version of it, and probably won't anytime soon.
So to see Linux get it "first" is completely unsurprising.
It's like saying Linux supported the EXT3 filesystem before Windows. So?
Beating out nVidia and AMD is marginally surprising, but OpenGL ES support in Windows I'd figure to be the lowest priority 3D interface to implement for Windows, behind Direct3D and OpenGL. MS' attempt at targeting the lower end market is still emphasizing Direct3D, with OpenGL on Windows mostly only mattering for the occasional game engine and engineering application. OpenGL ES on Windows I'm thinking is a very very small slice of potentially interested parties.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The only things that OpenGL provides that ES doesn't are the big, ugly, slow things which are useful for certain kinds of graphic design and industrial apps, but are completely useless for high-performance games. You're really not missing much, and in general if you're using things which are not provided by OpenGL ES to write apps where the real-time user experience counts, you are doing it wrong.
On Windows, the GPU is driven by either DirectX or OpenGL. Native OpenGL ES drivers for Windows are ONLY needed for cross-platform development where applications destined for mobile devices are built and tested on Windows first.
Now, this being so, the usual way to offer ES on the desktop is via EMULATION LAYERS that take ES calls and pass them on to the full blown OpenGL driver. So long as full OpenGL is a superset of ES (which is mostly the case), this method works fine.
The situation is different on Linux. Why? Because traditionally, Linux has terrible graphics drivers from AMD, Nvidia AND Intel. Full blown OpenGL contains tons of utterly useless garbage, and supporting this is more than Linux is worth. OpenGL ES is a chance to start over. OpenGL ES 2.0 already is good enough for ports of most AAA games (with a few rendering options turned off). OpenGL ES 3.0 will be an almost perfect alternative to DirectX and full blown OpenGL.
OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 is getting first class driver support on Linux class systems because of Android and iOS. OpenGL ES 3.0 will be the future standard GPU API for the vast majority of computers manufactured. However, on Windows, there is no reason to expect DirectX and full blown OpenGL to be displaced. As I've said, OpenGL ES apps can easily be ported to systems with decent OpenGL drivers.
Intel is focusing on ES because, frankly, its drivers and GPU hardware have been terrible. It is their ONLY chance to start over and attempt to gain traction in the marketplace. On the Windows desktop, Intel is about to be wiped out by the new class of AMD fusion (CPU and GPU) parts that will power the new consoles. AMD is light-years ahead of Intel with integrated graphics, GPU driver support on Windows, and high speed memory buses with uniform memory addressing for fused CPU+GPU devices.
Inside Intel, senior management have convinced themselves (falsely) that they can compete with ARM in low power mobile devices. This is despite the fact that 'Ivybridge' (their first FinFET device) was a disaster as an ultra low power architecture, and their coming design, Haswell, needs a die size 5-10 times its ARM equivalent. The Intel tax alone ensures that Intel could never win in this market. Worse again is the fact that Intel needs massive margins per CPU to simply keep the company going.
PS Intel's products are so stinky, Apple is about to drop Intel altogether, and Microsoft's new tablet, Surface Pro 2, is going to use an AMD fusion part.
No this is about OpenGL ES which is basically irrelevant on desktop Windows.
I went from OpenGL 1.x over to OpenGL ES, so I don't know most of what modern OpenGL can do. But one glaring weakness is that OpenGL ES doesn't support drawing quads, only triangles. Yeah, the GPU processes a quad as two triangles internally, but if it supports quads, there's less vertex data to generate and pass to the GPU. You can somewhat make up for it by using glDrawArrays, which uses array indexing into the vertex list, but in a lot of cases (especially for 2D scenes), it's still less efficient than if you had quads.
On the other hand, if you're not the one writing the apps, it can be infuriating to use a system that supports only OpenGL ES. Last time I tried to use Ubuntu on a system with only OpenGL ES support, I discovered that OpenGL ES basically meant "no graphics acceleration", because nothing in the repository supported it; everything wanted OpenGL.
That's probably changed since then (it was a few years ago), but it was pretty frustrating at the time, especially since the GPU itself was rated for full OpenGL, it was only that PowerVR charged extra for that driver and TI didn't want to license it.
Just curious, how would quads be more efficient than say, triangle strips for drawing quads?
I use it on the desktop for Android development because it's a pain in the arse to develop OpenGL ES at the best of times. Development turnaround is a lot faster than uploading to a device and discovering the shader is broken because of a syntax error.
He explained it in the comment: "there's less vertex data to generate and pass to the GPU"
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Triangle strips require everything in one draw call to be connected. If you want to draw N quads, you have to make N draw calls, passing 4 vertices each time. There's a significant amount of overhead involved in a draw calls, so this is slow. With quad support, to draw N quads you can just make a big array of 4N vertices and process it all in one draw call.
In my experience that will show an artifact. Like an odd line between triangles where there shouldn't be. It's been a while since i've worked in straight gl but you should reuse the vert to prevent that. Even if the verts are in the exact same position, it won't matter.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
The only things that OpenGL provides that ES doesn't are the big, ugly, slow things which are useful for certain kinds of graphic design and industrial apps, but are completely useless for high-performance games.
Like geometry shaders?