OpenGL Celebrates Its 30th Birthday

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenGL Celebrates Its 30th Birthday

It was on this day in 1992 that Silicon Graphics (SGI) released OpenGL to the world...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-30-Birthday

[guglovich]

Seizing the moment. It would be interesting to test the relevance of Xnine for Source games, test Mesa GLthread, and benchmarks against Gallium Nine.
By the way does anyone know how to do a benchmark with GALLIUM_HUD ? Previously saw an option to collect logs into a file, but both commands didn't work for me.

Second question. How does Dota 2 play now on older graphics cards without Vulkan? Switching to DX10/11>OpenGL ? DX9 seems to have been removed as well, so the option with Gallium Nine disappears.

[Quackdoc]

OGL is still a very good api for usage. and it will probably remain that way for a long time

[EvilHowl]

I have been experimenting with (modern) OpenGL for the past few months and I really like it. You can create surprisingly good software with it.

I think most of OpenGL's bad reputation comes from the old fixed pipeline days. Glad it's all deprecated now.

[coder]

What's the state of higher-level C/C++ libraries streamlining the use of Vulkan?

I don't know if it's a problem Khronos should be trying to solve, but it seems like Vulkan adoption would benefit from solutions that don't go as far as an entire game engine, but merely simplify the process of Vulkan programming by handling a lot of the chores and details that most programs shouldn't need to worry about.

To tie this back to the main subject of the article, some might recall that OpenGL had a companion API, called OpenInventor. It was meant as a higher-level API for making OpenGL easier to use (efficiently). And since Vulkan is even lower-level than OpenGL, it seems the need for such a thing is even greater.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Inventor

[coder]

I have been experimenting with (modern) OpenGL for the past few months and I really like it. You can create surprisingly good software with it.

I think most of OpenGL's bad reputation comes from the old fixed pipeline days. Glad it's all deprecated now.

Agreed, but having read through 2/3rds of the Super Bible, a few years ago, it's not a simple API.

My first takeaway was how much the API is designed to really push you to do everything on the GPU. The reasons are obvious, but it's almost like they wanted to make it more effort to do things in an inefficient way.

BTW, once you know OpenGL, here's a library I found for streamlining your code. It doesn't really provide abstraction, however. It's definitely a quality of life improvement, but no substitute for knowing what you're doing.

http://matus-chochlik.github.io/oglp...lus/intro.html

[erniv2]

My first takeaway was how much the API is designed to really push you to do everything on the GPU. The reasons are obvious, but it's almost like they wanted to make it more effort to do things in an inefficient way.

30 years ago nobody thought about GPU´s, the 1st OpenGL implementions in Windows 95/98 were pure Software, GPU´s with HW TL and newer OpenGL standards came after that, the 1st cards that implemented some GPU stuff were with Windows 98se i had a ATI mach64 back then and the hardware accelerated video playback was mindblowing back then i had a star trek 3 v-cd and i thought oh this rocks , that was the time when dx9 showed up and T&L was the holy grail.

And OpenGL is not realy a consumer product it´s there for Enterprise usage for Video Rendering for Movies or CAD Systems for enginering, or maybe Medicine Products Sonographie CT etc. , OpenGL has hardly any worth for consumer products like games where such precision, reliability, etc is not needed.

[EvilHowl]

Agreed, but having read through 2/3rds of the Super Bible, a few years ago, it's not a simple API.

My first takeaway was how much the API is designed to really push you to do everything on the GPU. The reasons are obvious, but it's almost like they wanted to make it more effort to do things in an inefficient way.

BTW, once you know OpenGL, here's a library I found for streamlining your code. It doesn't really provide abstraction, however. It's definitely a quality of life improvement, but no substitute for knowing what you're doing.

http://matus-chochlik.github.io/oglp...lus/intro.html

Yeah, when I started learning OpenGL, I quickly realised that there is no way I'm dealing with so many buffers, shaders and arrays without some kind of abstraction or wrapping. I started to implement simple wrappers to shaders or resource loaders, something like that library.

[kpedersen]

Gosh, time flies. I remember attending the OpenGL 20th anniversary party in 2012 during SIGGRAPH. Lots of beers that evening and some great chats with the Khronos guys.

https://www.khronos.org/events/openg...iversary-party

Here's to another 10 years! Even as a layer on top of Vulkan, Metal, DX; who cares, the API works very, very well for making portable software.

(It also serves me well with some great interview questions to ask potential candidates! It whittles down the hordes of Unity kids niiicely /jk*0.5)

[MorrisS.]

When will vulkan replace opengl?