Rich Geldreich Leaves Valves; Points To More "End Of OpenGL" Articles

[wizard69]

Your post is hard to follow, I assume English is a second language.

Praising metal seems like a sound thing to do.. riiiight..

So lets see, It is apple ONLY and ONLY for A7 arm, to be more specific, it will probably be PowerVR specific and only a subset of those chips will be supported.

It will most likely be supported on all new "A" series chips moving forward.

To get the same kind of low cost API call access that AMD has achieved with Mantle, PowerVR will probably need hardware changes to be able to communicate in that way.

You do realize that Apple has hired a huge number of AMD engineers. I fully expect Apple to move very closely to an architecture similar to AMDs HSA! That is support for heterogeneous computing.

Not only does Imagination tech need to add this hardware feature to PowerVR for metal to work, they also are going to need a driver that targets metal (I would expect Imagination tech devs not being all that happy with apple atm..), unless of course apple is going to write drivers for them. Whoever writes these drivers, it WILL take a while before they work well. Because that's how things go.

I suspect that in the case of iOS Apple is responsible for much of the drive software already.

Now, anyone that is not mantle or imagination tech, will probably not be wanting to use metal, just because it makes no damn sense to. Metal, and Mantle as well, while their APIs have a chance of becoming open, will probably carry a bias towards their first user.

Metal makes all the sense in the world. It is software tailored for Apples best mobile chips.

And since some programmers seem convinced that the same effect can be achieved in OpenGL(the hardware support for which would have already been added in GL4.3 or 4.4 or something, can't remember), it is probably entirely possible to do it in OpenGL.
Now the problem is probably that OpenGL is buggy and strange in some ways, but as long as ONE developer can use it in a good way, to the wanted effect of mantle and metal, it serves its purpose, and everyone else just have to adopt to that best practice of using OpenGL.

OpenGL and Metal will likely remain in iOS for some time. As such the developer can choose which is best for his needs. Games will certainly migrate to Metal and pro apps will stay with OpenGL. The question you should ask is why would any rational developer give up the extra performance of Metal. The reality is this, even if technology continues to move rapidly forward, it will be a very very long time before a mobile platform operating on two watts of power can match the performance of today's laptop and desktop solutions. If a new API though gives you the ability to move a app to an iOS device without loosing much performance wouldn't you do it?

[Guest]

Sounds like someone just got a better job offer from Apple.

Didn't read entire discussion.

[sarmad]

I think we can safely say that Mantle is dead:
1- Mantle only supports AMD GPUS, whereas DX12 supports all. DX12 will definitely arrive before Mantle manages to pick up.
2- Mantle only supports Windows, so there is absolutely no incentive to use Mantle over DX12.
3- The performance gain out of Mantle on the desktop is not worth the headache, even when you compare it to DX11 (10% for Battlefield, 6% for Thief).

On the other hand Metal is mainly targetting mobile devices, at least for now. So, when it comes to desktops, we are still pretty much left with the same two main APIs: DX and OpenGL.

So, OpenGL sucks? It looks like it. Is it going away? Doesn't look like it.

However, it's good to see compeition, as it will put more pressure on OpenGL to improve.

[grndzro]

I think we can safely say that Mantle is dead:
1- Mantle only supports AMD GPUS, whereas DX12 supports all. DX12 will definitely arrive before Mantle manages to pick up.
2- Mantle only supports Windows, so there is absolutely no incentive to use Mantle over DX12.
3- The performance gain out of Mantle on the desktop is not worth the headache, even when you compare it to DX11 (10% for Battlefield, 6% for Thief).

On the other hand Metal is mainly targetting mobile devices, at least for now. So, when it comes to desktops, we are still pretty much left with the same two main APIs: DX and OpenGL.

So, OpenGL sucks? It looks like it. Is it going away? Doesn't look like it.

However, it's good to see compeition, as it will put more pressure on OpenGL to improve.

DX12 is going to be locked to Windows 8/9. People in general hate Windows 8.
Developers will use Mantle/OGL due to cross platform compatibility.
Mantle is fairly compatible to ports to both PS4 and XB1.

Cross compatibility is the future, and DX12 dosent offer that.
Mantle + NVogl + ports is much better than DX + ports.

Besides from what a lot of people are saying supporting Mantle is not that difficult and pays dividends in porting.
So all you are left with is DX vs OGL. OGL has much better cross platform capability with the ability to support Linux and Steambox, and OSX.
Apple also updated to OGL4 with OSX 10.9

I'm sorry but DX12 is the one that is DOA. It truly has no place anywhere.

[nilssab]

Your post is hard to follow, I assume English is a second language.

Wow, what an asshole. Yes it's my second language, I also have a fluent third, but if my post was hard to follow it was probably because it's a forum post written late at night, more than anything else.

The question you should ask is why would any rational developer give up the extra performance of Metal.

Here are two good reasons why you wouldn't use metal, written by yourself:
1. "It will most likely be supported on all new "A" series chips moving forward." (thus not previous "A" series chips, or any other chip by any other vendor)
2. "It is software tailored for Apples best mobile chips." (first user bias)

Another reason is that if you could achieve the same with OpenGL, just do it with OpenGL.


What would "success" be for metal? I would say usage on non-apple devices, since as long as it's only iOS, everyone has to develop in OpenGL *as well*.
So the question is "Will it be used by other vendors?", and I believe the answer is "Not very likely".

The reality is this, even if technology continues to move rapidly forward, it will be a very very long time before a mobile platform operating on two watts of power can match the performance of today's laptop and desktop solutions. If a new API though gives you the ability to move a app to an iOS device without loosing much performance wouldn't you do it?

Do you honestly believe that PC wouldn't see the same API improvements? Low watt devices will never rival high watt devices, even if they rival the high watt devices of yesteryear(or decade, really). Low latency APIs might increase the performance, but it will do so for all devices, save consoles that already are pretty much optimized.

[justmy2cents]

Consoles have one big difference though. You can mess directly with the hardware, as it is the same for a console type (modify driver etc.). In the PC world you have to fight with the hardware abstraction (aka API). This is made even worse by the fact, that the quality of the abstraction can differ wildly depending on the vendor.

PS:
Still I somehow hoped for Valve to get more active with Khronos/OpenGL (they are a member afaik), to deal with the issues they've identified.

actually, that is thing of the past. consoles are less of specialized hw (no more things like emotion engine and such) than they were and all you could really do is exactly what zero-overhead brings. once this becomes standard there is simply no difference between console and pc

[dee.]

Haha, it took three pages for an actual primary source to the scenario the article is about to even get acknowledged.

Hi, I'm Rich Geldreich's mother, and I just wanted everyone to know that Rich wrote those blog posts or whatever because he was brainwashed by aliens. You know it to be true because I'm on an internet forum and made an account with Rich Geldreich's mother's name, and nobody else could ever do anything like that if they weren't Rich Geldreich's mother.

[Passso]

I think we can safely say that Mantle is dead:
1- Mantle only supports AMD GPUS, whereas DX12 supports all. DX12 will definitely arrive before Mantle manages to pick up.
2- Mantle only supports Windows, so there is absolutely no incentive to use Mantle over DX12.
3- The performance gain out of Mantle on the desktop is not worth the headache, even when you compare it to DX11 (10% for Battlefield, 6% for Thief).

On the other hand Metal is mainly targetting mobile devices, at least for now. So, when it comes to desktops, we are still pretty much left with the same two main APIs: DX and OpenGL.

So, OpenGL sucks? It looks like it. Is it going away? Doesn't look like it.

However, it's good to see compeition, as it will put more pressure on OpenGL to improve.

Mantle is dead ???

You seem to forget that now AMD has 100% of the console market : XBox One, PS 4 an Wii U
On those hardware still not optimized, it really makes sense for them to have a fast and unified API for developpers.

Concerning OpenGL, it is the only real universal API and yes they actually lacked of work to improve and follow DX.
But if big companies like Steam give them a real help they will surely improve quickly (like NVidia did on the driver side).

The only question is : will they accept to be "market driven" for that ?

[log0]

actually, that is thing of the past. consoles are less of specialized hw (no more things like emotion engine and such) than they were and all you could really do is exactly what zero-overhead brings. once this becomes standard there is simply no difference between console and pc

Where have I've written anything about specialized hw?

Consoles have the advantage of having the same hardware. So you can afford having a custom API exactly for this hardware and go as low level as you want.

But to go with your statement. Think of xbones slow main ram and tiny esram, data move engines with decoding capabilities(lz, jpeg). This is something you want to have control over.

This would not work for a PC, where you have to live with an abstraction that hides the hw differences.

[Akdor 1154]

Hi, I'm Rich Geldreich's mother, and I just wanted everyone to know that Rich wrote those blog posts or whatever because he was brainwashed by aliens. You know it to be true because I'm on an internet forum and made an account with Rich Geldreich's mother's name, and nobody else could ever do anything like that if they weren't Rich Geldreich's mother.

Well, Rich Geldrich's mother, at least you have read the thread, comprehended the article, and are commenting vaguely ontopic. You are already at an advantage to the vast majority of this inane thread.