OpenGL 4.5 Is Not The End Of The Road For OpenGL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenGL 4.5 Is Not The End Of The Road For OpenGL

Particularly after writing about OpenGL 4 progress in Mesa, it's quite common to see comments in our forums and elsewhere about people thinking when "Mesa is done" or how "OpenGL 4.5 is the last major release" or "Vulkan makes OpenGL dead", etc...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-Not-The-End

[humbug]

Ya openGL is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even amongst game devs some won't adopt Vulkan.

It probably does not mean more Linux games. But hopefully it means more performant Linux games and more consistency and predictability across different drivers and different IHVs.

[remm]

There's a glitch in the article. If "There are going to be millions of graphics processors out there still relying upon OpenGL as they don't meet the GL 4.1 / OpenGL ES 3.1 hardware base requirements for Vulkan." then these will not support OpenGL 4.6 either. I think personally OpenGL 4.6 will go on for pro applications, but will be dead for gaming, people will use either up to 4.5 or Vulkan.

[Herem]

I think the degree to which Vulkan becomes a magic bullet which improves Linux gaming will largely depend on its adoption on Windows.

If the developers see Vulkan as a superior development platform to DirectX 12 and start using it as their API of choice, then it will give Linux a boost due to easier porting between the two platforms. If on the other hand Vulkan is another OpenGL and becomes a second class citizen on Windows, then I can't see it making any real difference, other than the Linux drivers support (Especially for AMD) being in better shape relative to the Windows implementations.

The level of adoption will probably boil down to relative performance of both APIs and feature sets. I suspect the reality be somewhere between those two extremes of adoption with some major game engines having strong Vulkan implementations whilst others don't.

[elect]

it's quite common to see comments in our forums and elsewhere about people thinking when "Mesa is done" or how "OpenGL 4.5 is the last major release" or "Vulkan makes OpenGL dead", etc.

Well, those people simply know nothing or very few about the graphic dev world..

No way I am gonna deal with memory management and multithreading at low level.

It'll be very interesting comparing AZDO-GL to Vulkan

[Michael]

There's a glitch in the article. If "There are going to be millions of graphics processors out there still relying upon OpenGL as they don't meet the GL 4.1 / OpenGL ES 3.1 hardware base requirements for Vulkan." then these will not support OpenGL 4.6 either.

Not in full compliance, but it's possible to support the new extensions if they don't put any new requirements on the hardware, just as Mesa currently has many GL 4.4 and 4.5 extensions currently implemented.

[schmidtbag]

I don't get it - if one of the reasons of continuing OGL is for compatibility with older hardware, most older hardware that doesn't support Vulkan doesn't support OGL 4.x either, so what makes them think that releasing 4.6 or 5.0 will help anything?

[Michael]

I don't get it - if one of the reasons of continuing OGL is for compatibility with older hardware, most older hardware that doesn't support Vulkan doesn't support OGL 4.x either, so what makes them think that releasing 4.6 or 5.0 will help anything?

That it will still help those relying upon OpenGL games/applications.

[uid313]

What will SDL do when there is Vulkan?

[ssokolow]

What will SDL do when there is Vulkan?

I'm not sure what relevance this question has. SDL uses OpenGL in two places:

1. The Render API, which is a GPU-accelerated 2D API intended for porting old DirectDraw-based games to modern systems.
2. The API calls to create an OpenGL window, which you then draw to using the standard OpenGL APIs, since OpenGL doesn't standardize creating drawing contexts.

For #1, there isn't really much need for Vulkan since OpenGL already greatly exceeds the Render API's needs.
For #2, it's a no-brainer that they'll add some API calls to create a Vulkan window and call it a day.