I do not know how you got all that from the article... he clearly states that he has no intention of switching APIs.
I hadn't read the article at the time:-)
When I did, I realized he isn't stupid enough to switch everything to DirectX, but I also realized he had made a serious PR booboo in letting himself run off at the mouth, likely as not misquoted. There is no way the current state of multicore support and state switching in OpenGL 4 vs DirectX 11 adds up to enough reason to throw away cross platform support. That is no doubt as obvious to John as anybody else. I just can't imagine what got into him to say such a stupid and provocative thing with the certainty of leaving his credibility in tatters.
Well Carmark's id - which forgot how to make games after Carmack pushed out the creative talent one by one - is now owned by Bethesda who rose to dominance on the back of the crappy-but-workable Gamebryo engine. Now what were you saying about successful again?
Claiming that alternatives to MS in the game world are quixotic is simply delusional. There is exactly one segment that MS dominates in the game world and that is Windows gaming, the importance of which is steadily declining.
So, this week PC gaming is declining? IIRC last week we argued that PC gaming was increasing and has becamed better than console gaming due to the aging consoles specs.
And you know... PC gaming == Windows gaming
No, that's as you know. What I know is that Windows gaming has declined in a major way. If you don't believe it then just look at EA's quarterly reports. Consoles passed the Windows gaming platform years ago and Windows gaming has never recovered. Indeed, Windows gaming remains a large but declining market. Future expansion will take place in non-Windows PC gaming platforms. That means Apple and Linux. Yes, Apple runs on PCs now, don't you know? And Linux... think Android on PCs with the latest Radeon and nVidia hardware. It's simply inevitable, and that tidal wave will quickly wash away the dregs of the Windows gaming market.
I don't know about orders of magnitude but I'd be shocked if it didn't pick up steam what with Sony doing everything they can to alienate past and potential customers. If you don't want cutesy games then the Wii doesn't cut it. I do want cutesy games, I'm just saying...
Microsoft and Sony seem to have teamed up to do the best they can to ensure that this generation is the last hurrah for fat consoles. From here on, fat graphics machines will always be PCs, and later, Arms. Attempting to bring in yet another "supercomputer" console will be financial suicide for whoever tries it. Consoles must be designed as cheap as possible like Nintendo or people won't buy them. Consoles have exactly one thing going for them: convenience. There is no way consoles can ever again compete seriously in the high end gaming arena. Thanks Sony, thanks Microsoft, we don't like the walled garden anyway.
A bare 3% growth in eight years is telling when compared to the vitality shown by its competitors.
Rubbish. Expressed relative to a 2% base, reaching 5% market share represents a 150% expansion of the area of that wedge. And the whole pie grew. We all know what is going to happen when Microsoft's grip on OEMs finally slips. And it is beginning to slip now.
Seems to me Ballmer and Gahaffi have quite a bit in common.
Megatexture is cool but he's not the only guy to have figured that sort of thing out.
It's pretty much a direct copy of SGI clip textures. Carmack did make some good progress in shadow mapping, but as you say nothing that others aren't doing at least as well. Carmack continues to excel at optimizing for a relatively static game world with walls for horizons.
In my experience, the problem with OpenGL is in fact that they care(d) about backwards compatibility, which makes the whole system inflexible and static; this,IMO, is totally unsuitable for the highly innovative computer graphics area where new features and techniques to increase performance are critical.
It is easy to understand the importance of backward compatibility. Do you really want your 3D apps to stop working because the libaries got updated?
The compatibility profile solution that arrived in 3.1 is fine, well worth waiting for.
Intel chipsets use Mesa drivers, which are stuck in the OpenGL 2.1 stone ages.
Mesa @2.1 isn't too bad with all the extensions. But yes, it does lag. I think it was only recently I could use framebuffer objects and I absolutely refuse to write code to fall back to pbuffers.
1) GL3 was late and a disappointment (the disappointment is mostly related to not getting direct state access of GL objects)
I was elated and relieved. The last thing we needed is to lose backward compatibility. The way it was finally done, with compatibility profiles, is perfect. A half cocked solution should have truly been the death of OpenGL. Major kudos to those level heads who prevailed.
"Commander Keen creator says Direct3D is now better than OpenGL"
Heh, nice summary. John Carmack remains the preeminent optimizer of the game world, however the game world has pretty much passed optimizers by in favor of people who can deliver compelling content quickly. Actually, what he really said is, DirectX is marginally better than OpenGL (which is not at all clearly true) but the difference is marginal so it's not worth rewriting all his editor code. Nice way to blow tons of karma. Obviously, he isn't going to be implementing iPhone Rage on DirectX any time soon.
The problem with the OpenGL ARB is that it's design-by-clusterfuck. Instead of Khronos Group laying out specs along the lines of "here's the draft, we want your opinions about whether you can make it or not", it's "Vendor X suggests method X1, vendor Y suggests method Y1, 2 weeks of shitslinging goes on, suggestions modified, rinse and repeat".
Well, but the ARB specifications typically end up in the excellent zone, so something must be working. I actually read them, do you?
Linux hasn't gone very far in the home desktop market, still being behind MacOS and all
Linux is actually making good progress in the desktop world. Look, w3schools shows Linux at 5%, an all time high and not that far behind Apple. I actually know normal people, not geeks, who have installed Linux entirely as their own idea. And of course, Linux rules the world in phones at the moment, and soon in tablets as well. It's only a short jump from tablets back to the desktop.
Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just... quixotic.
Claiming that alternatives to MS in the game world are quixotic is simply delusional. There is exactly one segment that MS dominates in the game world and that is Windows gaming, the importance of which is steadily declining.
Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing.
Agreed there. In the not too distant future Microsoft's XBox business will be bigger than their OS division, but it won't be because the XBox division grew by orders of magnitude.
Now, as a programmer, I have a limited amount of time. I can spend that time working out an elegant way to handle the rather clunky extensions mechanism of OpenGL, or I can spend it optimising DirectX. If you're porting to a mobile platform, the chances are you'll want to rewrite your entire graphics engine anyway. The architecture is typically somewhat different so the same optimisations may not apply.
That's an odd tradeoff. You don't want to spend a small amount of time dealing with OpenGL extensions (hint: use Glew) but you are willing to spend a massive amount of time rewriting your game engine? Hint: write it to the EGL spec in the first place then you will also be writing to 3.1 core. Write once, run fast.
The OpenGL consortium has been crippled from time to time by various members demanding certain compromises.
Khronos group has been moving at breakneck pace (and doing excellent accurate work) for the last few years. That is crippled? I would love to see athletic!
Irony is that he said that OpenGL is better - when his opinion mattered.
Heh, that's it. He is still the goto guy for shadow algorithms but if you want strategic direction on how to succeed in the game world... well, lets just say that Farmville is doing better today than Quake, or even Quake-with-cars.
Sure, he has a point, DirectX may have a temporary lead in multithreaded rendering and state management. But OpenGL is moving up fast. The amount of progress in the last year is mind boggling. OpenGL 4 does a huge amount to close the gap with DirectX, and OpenGL remains far superior in at least one crucial way: cross platform support. Tell me John, how are you going to write Rage for iPhone or Android or PS3 with DirectX? And where do you think the money is in the next generation?
Also, it is just plain stupid to devalue the importance of backward compatibility. Kronos did the right thing by taking the deprecation/profile path and declining to submit to the imprudent demands of certain loudmouth game coder monkeys. The next battle in the game world will be fought on turf over which Microsoft has no control whatsoever. Anybody who is stuck with a single platform API at that point is going to lose. I have every confidence that OpenGL multicore support will meet or beat DirectX in a short time. And in the mean time, OpenGL is plenty good enough for me, the possibilities are nowhere near exhausted.
This is particularly true with the push for stereoscopic 3D gaming which, while there is some competition out there, means nVidia 3D Vision/DirectX only.
Nice post, however did you know that even lowly glxgears runs in 3D stereoscopic mode? It's not exactly rocket science and DirectX in no way has a monopoly on it.
My graphics rig has an air cooled video card several times the power of the one in the PS3, which has an obnoxious noisy fan and still melts down from time to time.
i can take a console game and play it on any console it was made for at people's homes. with Windows games you can't do that. you have to install, fight the DRM...
Slashdot Mirror
I do not know how you got all that from the article... he clearly states that he has no intention of switching APIs.
I hadn't read the article at the time :-)
When I did, I realized he isn't stupid enough to switch everything to DirectX, but I also realized he had made a serious PR booboo in letting himself run off at the mouth, likely as not misquoted. There is no way the current state of multicore support and state switching in OpenGL 4 vs DirectX 11 adds up to enough reason to throw away cross platform support. That is no doubt as obvious to John as anybody else. I just can't imagine what got into him to say such a stupid and provocative thing with the certainty of leaving his credibility in tatters.
Well Carmark's id - which forgot how to make games after Carmack pushed out the creative talent one by one - is now owned by Bethesda who rose to dominance on the back of the crappy-but-workable Gamebryo engine. Now what were you saying about successful again?
Claiming that alternatives to MS in the game world are quixotic is simply delusional. There is exactly one segment that MS dominates in the game world and that is Windows gaming, the importance of which is steadily declining.
So, this week PC gaming is declining?
IIRC last week we argued that PC gaming was increasing and has becamed better than console gaming due to the aging consoles specs.
And you know... PC gaming == Windows gaming
No, that's as you know. What I know is that Windows gaming has declined in a major way. If you don't believe it then just look at EA's quarterly reports. Consoles passed the Windows gaming platform years ago and Windows gaming has never recovered. Indeed, Windows gaming remains a large but declining market. Future expansion will take place in non-Windows PC gaming platforms. That means Apple and Linux. Yes, Apple runs on PCs now, don't you know? And Linux... think Android on PCs with the latest Radeon and nVidia hardware. It's simply inevitable, and that tidal wave will quickly wash away the dregs of the Windows gaming market.
I don't know about orders of magnitude but I'd be shocked if it didn't pick up steam what with Sony doing everything they can to alienate past and potential customers. If you don't want cutesy games then the Wii doesn't cut it. I do want cutesy games, I'm just saying...
Microsoft and Sony seem to have teamed up to do the best they can to ensure that this generation is the last hurrah for fat consoles. From here on, fat graphics machines will always be PCs, and later, Arms. Attempting to bring in yet another "supercomputer" console will be financial suicide for whoever tries it. Consoles must be designed as cheap as possible like Nintendo or people won't buy them. Consoles have exactly one thing going for them: convenience. There is no way consoles can ever again compete seriously in the high end gaming arena. Thanks Sony, thanks Microsoft, we don't like the walled garden anyway.
A bare 3% growth in eight years is telling when compared to the vitality shown by its competitors.
Rubbish. Expressed relative to a 2% base, reaching 5% market share represents a 150% expansion of the area of that wedge. And the whole pie grew. We all know what is going to happen when Microsoft's grip on OEMs finally slips. And it is beginning to slip now.
Seems to me Ballmer and Gahaffi have quite a bit in common.
Megatexture is cool but he's not the only guy to have figured that sort of thing out.
It's pretty much a direct copy of SGI clip textures. Carmack did make some good progress in shadow mapping, but as you say nothing that others aren't doing at least as well. Carmack continues to excel at optimizing for a relatively static game world with walls for horizons.
In my experience, the problem with OpenGL is in fact that they care(d) about backwards compatibility, which makes the whole system inflexible and static; this ,IMO, is totally unsuitable for the highly innovative computer graphics area where new features and techniques to increase performance are critical.
It is easy to understand the importance of backward compatibility. Do you really want your 3D apps to stop working because the libaries got updated?
The compatibility profile solution that arrived in 3.1 is fine, well worth waiting for.
Intel chipsets use Mesa drivers, which are stuck in the OpenGL 2.1 stone ages.
Mesa @2.1 isn't too bad with all the extensions. But yes, it does lag. I think it was only recently I could use framebuffer objects and I absolutely refuse to write code to fall back to pbuffers.
1) GL3 was late and a disappointment (the disappointment is mostly related to not getting direct state access of GL objects)
I was elated and relieved. The last thing we needed is to lose backward compatibility. The way it was finally done, with compatibility profiles, is perfect. A half cocked solution should have truly been the death of OpenGL. Major kudos to those level heads who prevailed.
"Commander Keen creator says Direct3D is now better than OpenGL"
Heh, nice summary. John Carmack remains the preeminent optimizer of the game world, however the game world has pretty much passed optimizers by in favor of people who can deliver compelling content quickly. Actually, what he really said is, DirectX is marginally better than OpenGL (which is not at all clearly true) but the difference is marginal so it's not worth rewriting all his editor code. Nice way to blow tons of karma. Obviously, he isn't going to be implementing iPhone Rage on DirectX any time soon.
how many times should we have to implement stencil shadows from scratch
Zero. Stencil shadows suck beyond belief, just don't do it.
The problem with the OpenGL ARB is that it's design-by-clusterfuck. Instead of Khronos Group laying out specs along the lines of "here's the draft, we want your opinions about whether you can make it or not", it's "Vendor X suggests method X1, vendor Y suggests method Y1, 2 weeks of shitslinging goes on, suggestions modified, rinse and repeat".
Well, but the ARB specifications typically end up in the excellent zone, so something must be working. I actually read them, do you?
Linux hasn't gone very far in the home desktop market, still being behind MacOS and all
Linux is actually making good progress in the desktop world. Look, w3schools shows Linux at 5%, an all time high and not that far behind Apple. I actually know normal people, not geeks, who have installed Linux entirely as their own idea. And of course, Linux rules the world in phones at the moment, and soon in tablets as well. It's only a short jump from tablets back to the desktop.
Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just ... quixotic.
Claiming that alternatives to MS in the game world are quixotic is simply delusional. There is exactly one segment that MS dominates in the game world and that is Windows gaming, the importance of which is steadily declining.
Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing.
Agreed there. In the not too distant future Microsoft's XBox business will be bigger than their OS division, but it won't be because the XBox division grew by orders of magnitude.
Now, as a programmer, I have a limited amount of time. I can spend that time working out an elegant way to handle the rather clunky extensions mechanism of OpenGL, or I can spend it optimising DirectX. If you're porting to a mobile platform, the chances are you'll want to rewrite your entire graphics engine anyway. The architecture is typically somewhat different so the same optimisations may not apply.
That's an odd tradeoff. You don't want to spend a small amount of time dealing with OpenGL extensions (hint: use Glew) but you are willing to spend a massive amount of time rewriting your game engine? Hint: write it to the EGL spec in the first place then you will also be writing to 3.1 core. Write once, run fast.
The OpenGL consortium has been crippled from time to time by various members demanding certain compromises.
Khronos group has been moving at breakneck pace (and doing excellent accurate work) for the last few years. That is crippled? I would love to see athletic!
Irony is that he said that OpenGL is better - when his opinion mattered.
Heh, that's it. He is still the goto guy for shadow algorithms but if you want strategic direction on how to succeed in the game world... well, lets just say that Farmville is doing better today than Quake, or even Quake-with-cars.
I'm an OpenGL developer and cans say without a shadow of a doubt that Carmack is talking absolute shit.
Agreed. Why is he doing it? At one time he appeared to have a spine.
Sure, he has a point, DirectX may have a temporary lead in multithreaded rendering and state management. But OpenGL is moving up fast. The amount of progress in the last year is mind boggling. OpenGL 4 does a huge amount to close the gap with DirectX, and OpenGL remains far superior in at least one crucial way: cross platform support. Tell me John, how are you going to write Rage for iPhone or Android or PS3 with DirectX? And where do you think the money is in the next generation?
Also, it is just plain stupid to devalue the importance of backward compatibility. Kronos did the right thing by taking the deprecation/profile path and declining to submit to the imprudent demands of certain loudmouth game coder monkeys. The next battle in the game world will be fought on turf over which Microsoft has no control whatsoever. Anybody who is stuck with a single platform API at that point is going to lose. I have every confidence that OpenGL multicore support will meet or beat DirectX in a short time. And in the mean time, OpenGL is plenty good enough for me, the possibilities are nowhere near exhausted.
This is particularly true with the push for stereoscopic 3D gaming which, while there is some competition out there, means nVidia 3D Vision/DirectX only.
Nice post, however did you know that even lowly glxgears runs in 3D stereoscopic mode? It's not exactly rocket science and DirectX in no way has a monopoly on it.
My graphics rig has an air cooled video card several times the power of the one in the PS3, which has an obnoxious noisy fan and still melts down from time to time.
i can take a console game and play it on any console it was made for at people's homes. with Windows games you can't do that. you have to install, fight the DRM...
FTFY.
Obsolescence? Get real! Even PS2 games are still going strong and making money for the developers.
Do you claim that the PS2 is not obsolescent? Surely you do not mean to be so bold (trying hard to avoid the word stupid here).
If anything it is Windows gaming that is gradually dieing.
FTFY.