OpenGL 4.0 Announced

[frag.machine]

Just saw that on Blue's News. Well, what can I say ? Better later than never.

[mh]

Checks calendar.
12th March.
20 days early.

[revelator]

oh you ....

well better late than newer

[dreadlorde]

[scar3crow]

No thoughts on this from the various insane engine people? I figured there would be more response. There was a semi-recent post by Wolfire about OpenGL 4.1, and how this combined with Steam on Mac might put some weight on the video card manufacturers to better support OpenGL.

I just love to see competition, particularly on things like standards for games - I admit I love the DX11 supporting 5770 I have on my work machine now, but I would really love to see OpenGL come back again, teeth bared, and keeping things open.

Maybe an OpenGL4.1 DP?

Or we could drive mh insane and request a OGL4.1 port of DirectQuake =D

[Spike]

We're not even using GL3. Why do you expect a response about GL4? :P

[mh]

I'm more excited about D3D11 to be honest, and some day I'm probably gonna port, but the main problem is the high-ish percentage of the Quake community that insists on clinging on to cruddy old hardware. I would have excised the fixed pipeline stuff entirely from my engine by now if it wasn't for that, but even going to a fully native shaders-only D3D9/GL2 codebase is too much for some of these people.

I think OpenGL's day has come and gone to be honest. Of course it's still the best (only!) choice if you want cross-platform, but there are serious problems underlying the fundamental design and concept of the API going all the way back to 1.0 that make it a total pain to work with at times (note that OpenGL ES doesn't have so many of these problems, and since 3.0 it's been moving in the right direction, but not fast enough and not far enough).

What kind of problems?

The extension mechanism is a mess. It's great for exposing new functionality early OK, but it's a nuisance to program to, and if you want the most robust code you can end up writing 2 or 3 versions of everything.

Lack of driver certification is a total balls-up, conformance testing is a joke. 10 years of bad ATI and Intel drivers are testament enough to that and I don't need to support this argument.

Falling back to software emulation is ridiculous; it's understandable when you're in a situation where the program must always work even if it's at the expense of performance, but for a program where performance is a requirement you'd much rather have proper capabilities enumeration (including an indication of whether or not a given extension is going to be software emulated) so that you can construct your code around that.

Hanging on to the legacy baggage has been holding it back, and the sad reality is that no matter how much 3.x and now 4.x push forward, CAD users will always prevent the clean redesign it badly needs.

It's too high-level and goes too far in abstracting the hardware, so that a colossal amount of OpenGL code you see is actually hugely inefficient and/or just plain wrong (GL_RGB, 32-bit indexes, etc).

I could go on. It's disappointing really because up to a certain point (1.3/1.4 level) OpenGL is actually a dream to work with, but once you go beyond that the design and implementation of D3D has actually proven to be more intuitive, cleaner and easier all round. Sigh.

[scar3crow]

[mh]

Your own post cheered up my downbeat perspective a little.

Yeah, competition between the two APIs is a good thing. Competition with D3D definitiely helped push OpenGL forward when it was stuck in a rut back in the old days (these days it's easy to forget the interminable wait for 2.0, and the ARB squabbling over finer points of terminology when they should have been evolving the API), and competition with OpenGL would likewise be a good thing for D3D. In fact it could be argued that some of the bad things about D3D10/11 (have you seen the initialization code? eeewww!) wouldn't have happened if there had been a viable strong competitor making worthwhile noise.

CAD == AutoCAD and others; a significant and vocal proportion of OpenGL users and a very slow-moving and conservative community - even more so than Quake! Forget about dumping legacy functionality with these guys, they need their hardware-accelerated anti-aliased stippled lines in color-index mode and they will kick up an almighty racket if they don't have them.

Maybe a way to move forward there would be to split OpenGL into "GL-CAD" and "GL-Game" APIs? I'm not an expert, I don't know.

I wish more people considered a D3D9 class system to be a baseline, and an 8800 to be cruddy and old. I've a user with a GeForce 4 MX (!!!!) who had trouble because I didn't support less than 3 texture units. Had to rip apart a lot of good clean code for that. I've seen people who consider a Radeon 7000 class card to be an "upgrade"! Even the integrated Intel in an el-cheapo knock-off will blow some of that kit out of the water. This seems to be more prevalent in the MP community than in the SP/modding/mapping community, but it does exist, and - for better or worse - DirectQ is probably in the top-3 functional MP clients these days, so it's something I do need to pay attention to.

And there I go on the downbeat trip again.

[leileilol]

[Irritant]

[frag.machine]

[mankrip]