OpenGL 1.5

[Sunday]

I was expecting 2.0 to be promoted as official at this year Siggraph, and I'm so disappointed that ARB comity didn't had the strength to pull out 2.0 finally!
Well Kurt Akeley (in the interview for Extremetech, a long time ago) was right that 1.5 will be the next standard, and not 2.0.
Filing that 1.5 is somehow product of corporate politics, and not an urge for technological advancing makes me sad! :?
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/july/opengl15.html

 

[Dave Baumann]

Well, the original proposal for 1.5 is very different to the 1.5 we have here, since this is the full OpenGL Shading Language extensions. This is a development path to OpenGL2.0, there are just a few conservatives on the ARB that want things trialled before they are moved into the core. There's still some elements that need to be tied down for the full OpenGL2.0 release.

 

[mrbill]

Take a look at the ARB minutes on opengl.org. We almost made it into the core this summer. I'm chair of the arb-gl2 workgroup. What I heard from others at the meeting at Apple is that IHVs need to implement the ARB extensions and I should come back again soon for another vote on promoting the Shading Language into the core. From the minutes "perhaps as soon as this fall."

Where are we today?

3Dlabs - shipping preliminary implementation of the OpenGL Shading Langauge and ARB extensions.

ATI - has implemented the OpenGL shading language and ARB extensions and is in Beta.

NVIDIA - Kurt Akeley announced on Sunday during the Real Time Shading course that NVIDIA is implementing the OpenGL shading language and ARB extensions.

(The OpenGL BOF is tonight, if there's more news, you'll hear about it.)


Finally, the OpenGL Shading Language course was in the big lecture hall Room 6 C-F yesterday. Impressive crowd of developers in the audience.

I'm of good cheer.

-mr. bill

 

[JD]

Also, I've seen nv mention in their cg faq they're working on gl2. I think the ihv are not ready for full gl2 yet and thus the 1.5 being born. Shaders are just a small part of gl2, there are whole host of other features that still need to be addressed and figured out.

 

[KimB]

Also, I've seen nv mention in their cg faq they're working on gl2. I think the ihv are not ready for full gl2 yet and thus the 1.5 being born. Shaders are just a small part of gl2, there are whole host of other features that still need to be addressed and figured out.

I think the idea is more that the ARB wants to make sure the major IHV's are going to support the OpenGL Shading Language before they go with OpenGL 2.0. Remember that this shading language requires each IHV to write their own compiler. It may take a little bit for those compilers to come up to par.

 

[JD]

I think 3DLabs provides a code for the shader compiler if I'm not mistaken. I think it came out a while ago.

 

[KimB]

I think 3DLabs provides a code for the shader compiler if I'm not mistaken. I think it came out a while ago.

If I remember correctly, each the shader language is meant to compile directly to machine code. It won't be compiling to assembly like ARB_fragment_program and ARB_vertex_program (or, at least, it's not meant to. It may do this at first for compatibility reasons), so IHV support is required.

Note that OpenGL may handle part of the compiling, to some sort of intermediate "pseudocode" that is hardware-independent. But each IHV will still need to support the compiler.