InsideQC Forums

Khronos Unleashes Cutting-Edge, Cross-Platform Graphics Acceleration with OpenGL 4.0

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

Checks calendar.
12th March.
20 days early.

oh you ....

well better late than newer

And Mesa is still on OpenGL version 2.1...

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.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/08/OpenGL-update
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

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

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.

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

I guess I was hoping maybe for some hopscotching? =D

but the main problem is the high-ish percentage of the Quake community that insists on clinging on to cruddy old hardware

I consider my 8800GTS to be cruddy old hardware, but thats probably because of the much better systems I have access to at work. Honestly I would say make a clean stable branch for the legacy support, and put a big sticker of "people with old hardware, go here" and push on forward.

I think OpenGL's day has come and gone to be honest.

Your own post has convinced me of anything but this - rather that OpenGL had a day, right now it is DX's day, but that may change as well. Steam on Mac, Diablo 3 and Rage as well may provide enough leverage on the manufacturers to squeeze the juice out of OpenGL rather than giving it a cursory nod and continuing full attention on DX.

I say this as a bit of a Windows fan actually - and I loathe OSX - I want DX to be fought tooth and nail, I want it to improve under survival of the fittest simply because of its OS limitations. I don't care for the notion of them.

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.

Allow me to demonstrate my ignorance, CAD? As in AutoCAD? Otherwise I have no idea of the term.

Regarding anything legacy, I am all for archiving cleanly, and then moving onward. Make it convenient for those who want to go back, to go back, but not to support them as a part of active development. The survivors of a zombie apocalypse shouldn't need to mail back bullets and medkits to the one guy who decided to make a stand. I understand the cost of hardware, but a DX9 system shouldn't be too costly to roll these days, and in fact going much further back runs into escalated costs due to natural scarcity of now less functional hardware.

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.

I guess I can only hope that the curve will change and adjust, that as more titles are cross platform, there will be more incentive for manufacturers to better support OpenGL, which increases the customer demands on OpenGL, giving them incentive to make better decisions perhaps?

Maybe I'll hire Fred Savage to help me make scar3GL, and put an end to this silliness!

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.

mh wrote:This seems to be more prevalent in the MP community than in the SP/modding/mapping community,

Agreed. It's worse across Linux and *BSD when you have people complaining about running your game at 0-3fps while they are unknowningly using software MesaGL rasterization thanks to poor drivers. Keep in mind, these are on MODERN COMPUTERS which would at least probably have the on-board video guts to gain something better than Voodoo2-on-PII speeds (20fps)... and i'm referring to just free id tech3 games. But either way, it seems to be pinned as the fault of the developer for not caring about them (what?! a id tech3 software renderer are you out of your damn mind!?)

It's also hilarious when pro/serious gamers whine about FPS and own very bad cards such as a FX5200. See: The progressive demise of Quake4 from demand of uncheating the ambientlight cvar completely spoiling the game's visuals, balance and appeal because a bunch of whiny crowd of pro gamer egos owned the worst video card from 2003 completely missing the point of 'system requirements'

mh wrote:Of course it's still the best (only!) choice if you want cross-platform,

That is the deal breaker for D3D. No cross platform = no possibility of use for many who value this, and in the open sourced communities, that's the majority of people.

Speaking about OpenGL...

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... /25/134209

leileilol wrote:It's worse across Linux and *BSD when you have people complaining about running your game at 0-3fps while they are unknowningly using software MesaGL rasterization thanks to poor drivers.

This reminds me that many (most?) computers in Brazil are so cheap that there are no Linux drivers with proper support for hardware acceleration for them.

My laptop has one of these, a Via Chrome9 HC IGP Family WDDM, which seems to have been customized by the mainboard manufacturer as it doesn't work with Via's own drivers, and Via stopped development of the Linux version of its drivers, leaving them forever in a beta stage anyway, so I could only get Linux running in it without any kind of hardware acceleration.

On the "plus" side, this means that software-rendered Quake engines could be quite useful for Linux users.