5 March Will Be A Very Exciting Day For Next-Gen OpenGL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 5 March Will Be A Very Exciting Day For Next-Gen OpenGL

Earlier this month a GDC 2015 session was listed for showing off "glNext", the next-generation OpenGL. This major advancement for a cross-platform, multi-purpose graphics API is going to be presented by Valve, Epic Games, Unity, and the Khronos Group, among others. Besides the GDC session for glNext, on the same day they'll be having a separate event about this new API...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=glNext-5-March

[gamerk2]

I could care less about what it can do graphically, since we know its going to be about the same as DX12 or whatever else gets developed. What matters is how the API is structured. If it's not as easy to use as the other APIs, it will not gain traction in the Windows world, and thus, more shoddy ports.

[rabcor]

Definitely agree with the above poster, OpenGL has been on par with or even better than DirectX 10/11 for a long time now, it may have fallen a bit behind in the era of DX9, but that has long passed. Yet that didn't have much effect, new and old developers alike kept preferring DX over OGL. (With a few exceptions of course, like Josh Parnell)

The biggest failing point of OGL has always been that it's harder to "pick up" and use than DX. Performance and capabilities need to be at least on par with DX12, documentation and availability/ease of use need to be even better than what DX12 has. I know Khronos can pull something like that off, but either way it's no joke to even try... I really hope they do get that far though.

[emblemparade]

My concern is interoperability between the "low-level" area of the many APIs.

Mantle, Metal and other low-level access means that we'll be writing a lot more C-style shader-like code than we currently are. Already OpenGL and Direct3D and OpenCL and CUDA all have different languages, slightly similar but different enough that it requires complete rewrites. (OpenGL has several versions of its shader language, too.)

I understand that Mantle and Metal and D3D12 and glNext will do things a bit differently, but I'm really hoping for less work to make crossplatform engines in the future...

I'm also really hoping that glNext will be good enough that Apple's Metal will disappear. In the past, Apple has been a good sport about deprecating their own innovations when the industry at large embracing something else. But they won't be doing that if glNext sucks.

[Creak]

I wish you both good luck (gamerk2 and rabcor) to port your DX12 apps on Mac and Linux!
Here is why OGL is important and interesting to some companies, even if it's a bit more difficult to learn than DX12.

[Creak]

Come one... give some credit to the guys! You have to admit at least that the birth of glNext is very different than the previous version of OpenGL. It comes from AMD's Mantle and is backed by a game studio (i.e. Valve). That's promising!

[MartinN]

Phoronix: 5 March Will Be A Very Exciting Day For Next-Gen OpenGL

Earlier this month a GDC 2015 session was listed for showing off "glNext", the next-generation OpenGL. This major advancement for a cross-platform, multi-purpose graphics API is going to be presented by Valve, Epic Games, Unity, and the Khronos Group, among others. Besides the GDC session for glNext, on the same day they'll be having a separate event about this new API...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...glNext-5-March

Exciting times we live in! If they pull this off the 'right way' (tm), it will push Metal, and my hope, DX12 eventually as well into obsolescence. Breaking free from Microsoft's PC gaming reign is a behemoth task. What gives me confidence is that Khronos' leadership has a deep sense of urgency to deliver on this based on some of the statements they've made in the recent past. If they keep that spirit alive, nothing can stop them. It's theirs to lose. Re-inventing the entire paradigm is necessary and I'm glad they aren't obsessed w/backward compatibility - shift the burden of porting to the new API on developers! Apple did it, it did wonders for them. Backward compatibility, taken to an extreme, is overrated and an innovation killer.

[schmidtbag]

I could care less about what it can do graphically, since we know its going to be about the same as DX12 or whatever else gets developed. What matters is how the API is structured. If it's not as easy to use as the other APIs, it will not gain traction in the Windows world, and thus, more shoddy ports.

IIRC, OGL-Next is supposed to be a complete re-write from scratch; I think the first ever for openGL. It is not going to be backward compatible with older versions and is going to be written to have a better structure. I'm guessing it revolves around the modern design of GPU hardware, much in the same way Wayland does (vs Xserver). OGLN could potentially be the best API yet, if its done right. AMD pulled of Mantle in a relatively short amount of time and that was proven effective enough to make MS, Khronos, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, and many game companies to work on new APIs. I think Mantle was written from the ground up, but I might be wrong about that.

[kenjitamura]

Oh cool they decided to call it "glNext". When they did that survey to pick a name for the new OpenGL standard, coincidentally, that was what I wrote in

[Szzz]

Graphics and Compute API

I'm interested in how much will it be "and compute", may it also be a replacement for OpenCL as well?