Rich Geldreich: A Bad Catalyst GL Driver Is Bad For Everyone

[blackiwid]

Too many assumptions in this statement.

"I HAVE A DREAM..."...that we can drink out of our toilets and that Mantle becomes the new OS-Independend Standard..."

I just say Opengl is sucky land, everybody hates it like hell, I dont programm opengl so I dont care to much, but 3d-Developers seem to do, at some point Opengl has to die. It evolves to slow, even DX gets a complete Restart now. And Opengl is no longer primary 3d engine under macosx. So you think opengl as a more or less linux-only library in the long run is a good alternative?

Its good enough for 3d-Desktop or Map-apps, but for game-development it did die after Quake3 or so 10 years ago. People only use it when the want really hard something that runs under linux and because there is nothing else under linux, but all AAA Titel are not developed in Opengl, it has maybe a reason.

[tuubi]

I just say Opengl is sucky land, everybody hates it like hell, I dont programm opengl so I dont care to much, but 3d-Developers seem to do, at some point Opengl has to die.

You don't develop with OpenGL, but still you represent absolutely everybody who does? Sure, professionals have criticised it, but only uninformed people like you are calling for it's death. OpenGL is still the only existing cross-platform 3D graphics api supported by all major hardware vendors.

And Opengl is no longer primary 3d engine under macosx.

Yes it is, unless Metal sprouted support for it last night. Yesterday it only supported IOS on specific ARM chipsets.

So you think opengl as a more or less linux-only library in the long run is a good alternative?

MS or Apple simply cannot drop OpenGL support. I won't bother explaining why, as it should be obvious. And no API controlled by a single company will be able to replace it entirely.

[blackiwid]

You don't develop with OpenGL, but still you represent absolutely everybody who does? Sure, professionals have criticised it, but only uninformed people like you are calling for it's death. OpenGL is still the only existing cross-platform 3D graphics api supported by all major hardware vendors.

I never said that I represent every opengl developer, I just said that most feedback about opengl is negative, even on people using opengl, all the 90% directx people (I talk about game developers or engine developers) have a even more clear opinion against opengl, else why would all engine companies of better engines chose directx as their api? opengl was faster, and still nearly no engine used by AAA games used it. Even id soft moved away from it.

Yes it is, unless Metal sprouted support for it last night. Yesterday it only supported IOS on specific ARM chipsets.

k I did not know that.

MS or Apple simply cannot drop OpenGL support. I won't bother explaining why, as it should be obvious. And no API controlled by a single company will be able to replace it entirely.

That with the controll seems to be changing. Of course keep all closed up forever it will not happen. But I am optimistic about it. But we will see in the future.

[Jimmy Shelter]

You don't develop with OpenGL, but still you represent absolutely everybody who does? Sure, professionals have criticised it, but only uninformed people like you are calling for it's death. OpenGL is still the only existing cross-platform 3D graphics api supported by all major hardware vendors.

I, on the other hand, have developed with both OpenGL and D3D.

The point is that just being "the only existing cross-platform 3D graphics api supported by all major hardware vendors" is no longer good enough. Most game studios are already in multiple-API land; they use D3D on Windows and the proprietary console APIs on console platforms, and if they're supporting both this-gen and last-gen that's 5 different APIs already supported by an engine.

This is a solved problem. Game studios have discovered that not having a single standard API that works on all of their target platforms is not actually that big a deal. OpenGL offers a solution to a problem that doesn't even exist.

So once you discard that as a reason to prefer OpenGL, what reasons are you actually left with? When you're no longer bound to OpenGL because you've accepted that you're already in multiple-API land anyway, you can begin to examine what else it offers you with a more critical gaze. And that's when the hard reality starts to come out: OpenGL is actually kinda crap.

Now, there's still a lot to like in the API, but there's also a lot of badly broken thinking behind it's design, and the apparent unwillingness of the ARB to address the real problems that people face when actually using it only makes things worse. Recent OpenGL developments tend to remind me of the death-throes of 3DFX more than anything else. Big promises, failure to deliver, going off and doing it's own weird thing rather than being compatible with where the industry as a whole is moving to. AZDO is neat, but it's almost completely orthogonal to the design of a renderer to maximize performance on any other API.

Because of all of this, OpenGL in it's current incarnation needs to die. Or at least be feature-frozen and re-implemented as a pure-software layer on top of something else. Because it's no longer serving the purpose for which it was originally designed, and the bad habit in certain quarters of abandoning all critical perspective and thinking it's awesome just because it runs on Unix-alikes, while at the same time ignoring the genuine flaws in it, will only make that death more protracted and messy than it needs to be.

[blackiwid]

Because of all of this, OpenGL in it's current incarnation needs to die. Or at least be feature-frozen and re-implemented as a pure-software layer on top of something else. Because it's no longer serving the purpose for which it was originally designed, and the bad habit in certain quarters of abandoning all critical perspective and thinking it's awesome just because it runs on Unix-alikes, while at the same time ignoring the genuine flaws in it, will only make that death more protracted and messy than it needs to be.

The positive Aspect on this, is that it only can die under linux, and beeing replaced with something else, is with a api thats implemented in free drivers, like the intel one. We know that most indie game developers who support linux also target mesa. And except some maybe extremly high demanding farcry 20 game that is not so hardware-hungry u have to target also mesa and igps. So I am very optimistic that it will not only come for fglrx but also for mesa. AMD called this api now "opensource api" so I belive it will come.

Of course if it would be amd blob only it would not be more than a gimmik in 2-3 games here and there. So opengl feature right now is not so much the multi-os support but the full linux-drivers support. Take that away and for gaming most will move away I guess

[log0]

My personal annoyance with OpenGL is, that it is actually multiple APIs and not one. GL2-4 (ignoring GL1 here) code paths will differ from each other (if you care about performance). Don't even start with vendor specific extensions...

Which leads to the other huge issue of varying implementation quality. It is unbelievable that it took Khronos so long to get mandatory conformance tests for their APIs.

Regarding OpenGL being different from the other recent APIs, I guess they will fix this in a couple of years, by providing extensions for better dx12/mantle compatibility.

[stalkerg]

Sony PS3/PS4, Wii used OpenGL (variants).

We have D3D for Windows/XBox and OpenGL for other. Need more money for GL driver quality and drop <GL3,4 deprecated API.

[blackiwid]

I read very pissed reactions when Khronos released the specs for Opengl 4.0. It moves to slow. So what do we do in opensource if something moves to slow? Yes the final nail in the coffin was some lisense shit, but XFree86 was critisised because of it getting better in a to slow rate.

And after the fork they did not just fix the lisense but modulise it and make it faster better. I dont really see a opengl fork, maybe OpenCL we will see, but thats the problem, in Linux we fix stuff, so if there is a organisation like khronos that cares more about some special interests of some companies but the mass wants a good gaming api, at some point we have to fix it. And again its not just now a hype discussion, after the release of opengl 4.0 there was very much critics, they just make to less radical changes.

At least thats what I get out of that comments. Again I am no expert but it seems other here also see opengl as a problem while actualy using it.

[Jimmy Shelter]

Sony PS3/PS4, Wii used OpenGL (variants).

A commonly held misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding all the same.

No, they don't.

The PS3 offered PSGL, which was a GL ES and NVIDIA CG derivative, but nobody used it because the performance was horrible. PS3's native API, which everybody used instead, was LibGCM: http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/RSX#RSX_Libraries

The PS4 uses a low-level API called GNM and a high-level API called GNMX: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-playstation-4

The Wii uses it's own proprietary API called GX: http://devkitpro.org/wiki/libogc/GX

I really wish people would stop this misinformation, because "OpenGL everywhere" isn't.