[GLX]

http://opengl3.org/

"OpenGL 3.0 Specification Overview
OpenGL hardware and driver plans - AMD, Intel, NVIDIA
Developer's perspective on OpenGL 3.0
The new Khronos Compute Working Group and how that affects OpenGL
and more..."

If there is an overview of a specification, does that mean there's finally a specification?

[Killer-Kris]

It's about friggen time!

[bowman]

The new Khronos Compute Working Group and how that affects OpenGL

More info on OpenCL (or whatever the final standard will be called). Nice.

[Karoshi]

Why wait for SIGGRAPH? sigh.

[Humus]

Well, the OpenGL guys seem to like Siggraph... Nothing wrong with Siggraph, in fact, I really loved it when I had the opportunity to be there in 2006, but if they missed the first Siggraph 2007 schedule it would have been nice if they didn't make us wait until Siggraph 2008. This last year there has been essentially zero new updates on the API and how it's progressing. From an outside perspective, it looks almost like they've just waited for Siggraph 2008 instead of say releasing the spec in the beginning of the year. In the mean time the API has been slowly but surely sliding into irrelevance ...

[Npl]

Originally Posted by GLX

http://opengl3.org/

"OpenGL 3.0 Specification Overview
OpenGL hardware and driver plans - AMD, Intel, NVIDIA
Developer's perspective on OpenGL 3.0
The new Khronos Compute Working Group and how that affects OpenGL
and more..."

If there is an overview of a specification, does that mean there's finally a specification?

I really hope, its overdue for 6 months or so?
If they say something like "We will be providing specs in Arial 12pt" im surely gonna be a tad dissapointed.

[pudmn]

http://opengl.org/registry/doc/glspec30.20080811.pdf

OpenGL 3.0 = OpenGL 2.2

Nothing revolutionary.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by pudmn

http://opengl.org/registry/doc/glspec30.20080811.pdf

OpenGL 3.0 = OpenGL 2.2

Nothing revolutionary.

No-one really expected anything else, as far as I know anyway, right?
I mean, at least for all i've read and understood, 3.0 wasn't meant to be anything but a "rewrite" of the API with the next version supposed to bring the new features bringing OpenGL features to match "DX10 level" hardware

[I.S.T.]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

No-one really expected anything else, as far as I know anyway, right?
I mean, at least for all i've read and understood, 3.0 wasn't meant to be anything but a "rewrite" of the API with the next version supposed to bring the new features bringing OpenGL features to match "DX10 level" hardware

It was expected to be a 100% from the ground up rewrite.

[Zengar]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

No-one really expected anything else, as far as I know anyway, right?
I mean, at least for all i've read and understood, 3.0 wasn't meant to be anything but a "rewrite" of the API with the next version supposed to bring the new features bringing OpenGL features to match "DX10 level" hardware

3.0 was expected and promised to be a completely new API with new, simplified and straightforward programming model. For political reasons ARB decided to keep the old API.

[TimothyFarrar]

Originally Posted by Humus

In the mean time the API has been slowly but surely sliding into irrelevance ...

I think that is arguable given how "relevant" DX10 has been given that it isn't supported on XP and isn't supported on the consoles.

GL prior to 3.0 was supporting DX9 level features, which is still the API level target for just about all games. With GL3, DX10 level support is core in the API, and not only will you see GL3 support on XP from NVidia (I'm guessing here, because I have any insider info), other vendors might also support this as well.

So in this regard GL3 certainly has some serious potential market advantages over DX10, not only will be it supported on Macs, and Linux, but also probably have better support on windows than DX10 (because of XP)...

[Davros]

Originally Posted by Zengar

for political reasons ARB decided to keep the old API.

political ?

[Zengar]

As far as I understood some CAD companies were against the new APi because it would - ahh - break their precious badly written rendering code. That is what I call politics The IHVs themselves seem to want the new API badly, because it means greatly simplified driver developement and better driver quality. But hey... what do you want from a consortium that has so many members? It is known that the larger the group the less work it can do...

In my opinion someone (hey Apple )should just take the lead and publish the alternative OS-independend API. With some luck it may become the new standart. Anyway, the current GL programming model (selectors and stuff) is not up to date for the modern world and badly needs a replacement.

[idsn6]

This should be an interesting BoF. I wonder if eggs will be thrown.

[DemoCoder]

The problem is, the rest of the world (non-Microsoft) has no alternative. The OGL API is reasonably abstract and can be ported to almost every platform, DirectX is tightly woven to MS platform concepts.

If Microsoft was smart, they'd create an "OpenDirectX" divorced from Windows that could be ported to run on OSX, Linux, non-WinCE mobile platforms, etc. They'd get a lot of goodwill, and driven the nail in GL's coffin.

[nAo]

How do you get IHVs to work on a third API drivers? It's not like they can ditch OpenGL.
It's a lose lose situation, OpenGL is (unfortunately) not going to die anytime soon, at the same time we are stuck with an API that imho didn't make any sense 15 years ago and makes even less sense now.

[Zengar]

Originally Posted by nAo

It's a lose lose situation, OpenGL is (unfortunately) not going to die anytime soon, at the same time we are stuck with an API that imho didn't make any sense 15 years ago and makes even less sense now.

Could you elaborate? GL was clearly superior to DX till about DX9.0 both feature wise and API-wise. GLs stagnation started 5-6 years ago because ARBs incompetence.

[Color me Dan]

Isn't it possible to reverse this unfortunate event or will most of the OGL dev community drop it if they can? There must be some drive to fix what's wrong and since most devs seem to openly show their displeasure It wouldn't be that far fetched to see the Khronos group going back. I don't work with this, so I don't know how it works in the industry. But being that OGL is important to many platforms It'd be weird if they didn't try and redo this to keep or gain some confidence again.

[Humus]

Originally Posted by DemoCoder

If Microsoft was smart, they'd create an "OpenDirectX" divorced from Windows that could be ported to run on OSX, Linux, non-WinCE mobile platforms, etc. They'd get a lot of goodwill, and driven the nail in GL's coffin.

But what would Microsoft gain on that? I think they (unfortunately) make perfect business sense now. They have no particular interest in killing OpenGL. Winning an API war doesn't bring any cash in. DirectX in itself is not generating any profits for Microsoft. It's all about selling copies of Windows and preserving the OS monopoly. DirectX makes Windows the only gaming OS for PC, and Linux and Mac is never going to gain any serious market share unless you can also play games. And with Xbox it's of course also about making sure the best games comes to their platform of choice. To me it seems like MS started getting it right about when they went into the console business. I'm not sure if that's because they got some hardware experience on their own, or simply because they put more effort into DirectX because of it.

Now if they were to release an OpenDirectX, then that would be inviting Linux and Mac into the gaming community and making these platforms a lot more attractive for a lot of people. I don't see the business sense of that from Microsoft's point of view, although I would applaude the move if they did. The best thing for Microsoft would be if DirectX kept widening the gap, while OpenGL stayed around and bogged everyone else down.

Instead, I think Apple and the Linux community must realize OpenGL is a burden at this point. Quite frankly, no one cares (or at least no one should care) about syntatic sugar and convenience functions (that belongs in D3DX/GLU/GLUT anyway) and the exact functions that you call to make things draw on the screen is irrelevant. All that is going to be stuffed behind your own abstraction anyway if your code is well written.

The best thing would be if there was an opensource innitiative to create that OpenDirectX that would bring native bindings into the Linux kernel and allow IHVs to write drivers for it. And then write a GL-to-DX wrapper and deprecate the OpenGL support. In the long term that would be a gain for the IHVs too. Only one API to support.
And perhaps also take a page out of Microsoft books, "embrace and extend", to bring extensions to the DirectX as well and let you do fancy stuff on Linux and Mac that the native interface in Windows can't do.

Quite frankly, I think that's the only way anyone's ever going to break Microsoft's monopoly and bring some competition to the OS market.

Originally Posted by Color me Dan

Isn't it possible to reverse this unfortunate event or will most of the OGL dev community drop it if they can? There must be some drive to fix what's wrong and since most devs seem to openly show their displeasure It wouldn't be that far fetched to see the Khronos group going back. I don't work with this, so I don't know how it works in the industry. But being that OGL is important to many platforms It'd be weird if they didn't try and redo this to keep or gain some confidence again.

If you take twice the time and deliver less than half of what was promised, I don't know what will give people back the confidence in it. And it's not the first time either. The API was also going to be rewritten for OpenGL 2.0. There were a lot of visionary talk and in the end we got a bunch of extensions promoted to core. People were disappointed then too. This time people really expected those visionary talks to finally come true. And all we got was a bunch of extensions promoted to core. No one's going to believe a word of what they say from now on. It's a lost cause at this point as far as I'm concerned.

[TimothyFarrar]

As for GL3, I think EXT_direct_state_access is a move in the right direction.

[Rodéric]

Originally Posted by TimothyFarrar

As for GL3, I think EXT_direct_state_access is a move in the right direction.

"A move" is not nearly what we were promised neither expecting.

OpenGL 2.0 "Pure" is long overdue.

[TimothyFarrar]

Originally Posted by Rodéric

"A move" is not nearly what we were promised neither expecting.

What we were expecting was a new API without (without!) any new hardware support in core, no DX10 level support. This choice would have kept GL quite behind indeed. Until the next major update.

What we got was an update with DX10 support, and with a depreciation route towards placing GL in a better position to roll in a new object model (new API).

So they swapped priorities. Personally I think they made the right choice given the situation.

[Rodéric]

In 2002 3DLabs proposed a new OpenGL, 2.0 "Pure", which was to get rid of the slow path and move the API in the era of programmable hardware.
We are 6 years later, and we still don't have it.

Firms could see that coming in 6 years and prepare for the change.
Even OpenGL 3.0 Long Peaks (covering R3xx/NV4x up, with ARB extensions for D3D10 features, AFAIR) and Mount Evans (covering G8x/R6xx and so D3D10 level hardware) have been announced since years, long enough for firms to get ready.

Clearly, if the schedule was followed, we would have OpenGL 3.0 (Long Peaks) and OpenGL 3.1 (Mount Evans) by now...

[DemoCoder]

Originally Posted by Humus

But what would Microsoft gain on that? I think they (unfortunately) make perfect business sense now. .

Quite simply, because in the long run, they will fail. Sooner or later, someone is going to put out a DirectX clone, and at some point, the industry will get behind it. Once that happens, they will lose control. It may take along time, but it will happen. Thus, they're better off trying to entrench the API further by offering help to port it. It won't impact their sales of Windows or XBox360 in the slightest, but it will do is increase developer mindshare.

You see it happening today with Internet Explorer. For a long time, they eschewed supporting open standards and insisted on adding proprietary semantics in their browser to enforce lock in, and it worked for awhile, when they had 90% of the browser market. They could do anything they wanted, and offering to hand over and commoditize features to competitors seemed like a lose-lose position. Then Firefox and WebKit provided viable, better, alternatives to IE, and their marketshare started slipping. Now with IE8, they have returned to the fold, but too late. Their position in weakened. The traditional powerstructure (W3C) has been made irrelevent, and the future of Web standards is now controlled mostly by Google, and anti-Microsoft contributors. It is likely that IE is on the path to obsolescence.

I know it seems utterly ridiculous and unthinkable, but ponder a scenario where compute shaders become a common programming model for lots of non-gaming tasks. There's no way data centers today are going to switch from Linux to Windows, and AMD/NVidia/Intel will surely want to sell solutions to these people, therefore, they have a vested interest in making sure minimally, a viable GPGPU/compute-shader driver architecture shows up on Linux, whether its OpenCL/LLVM or something else. Either way, it's not unthinkable that a separate industry push to run compute shader tasks on multicore or GPU via a standardized API would evolve into a render API as well. Microsoft would suddenly find themselves with no voice in a whole new market segment.

Anyway, if you look at Microsoft's history, only very few of their initiatives are profitable, many are cost centers aimed at heading off competitors in emerging markets. They have launched tons of APIs and products for which there's no real business model, except that they didn't want someone else to control it.

[rpg.314]

For whatever reasons, the old API has been kept. IF, it's because of CAD folks, even then I don't expect the IHV's to drop full OGL support because it would kill their high-margin workstation products. As for the API itself, I had chosen to wait for this before I started learning about programmable graphics pipeline, but now it seems that we are not going to get it any time soon.

As for OGL's future, I have seen the community break out in hives on OGL's forums and I am extremely disappointed that this is the second time they chose to let the past screw the future. Hey, even MS is looking to ditch classical windows in favor of Midori.

My point is, sometimes, you just have to make a clean break from the past if you want to do great in the future. It's a simple law of evolution. Either you adapt yourselves to changing environment, or you go extinct.

I can't figure out why didn't mandate all gl3 stuff(types,functions etc) to be prefixed with gl3 and let old stuff stay and mark it deprecated. After a few years and iterations, drop old stuff entirely and mandate a change of prefix from gl3 to gl to fix the version madness and complete the transition. Sure the function names will have to be changed but come on, how hard is a search and replace in your editor.

As for MS, EEE is in their blood. It is a genetic problem with them. They simply can't resist the temptation to fuck "truly" open standards.