OpenGL 3 Updates

[Brolingstanz]

"Anyone" will not be writing such implementations; they should be written by people with actual deep hardware knowledge.

Deep hardware knowledge and, dare I say, a flare for the extraordinary ;-)

[Brolingstanz]

First of all, such a group would need to sell it's API, to make a living, instead of giving it away for free, as it is now.

True enough; there is the whole economic facet at work here. Don't know all the angles myself but you can bet your bottom dollar that no company or organization is furthering OpenGL from the goodness of their hearts or as part of some idealistic crusade for cosmic justice. That's fine, of course, but a point probably worth bearing in mind.

[Seth Hoffert]

if you take a close look at cude, there is not much that sets it appart from todays shaders (my personal opinion). extend the shaders to access shared resources (shared on chip memory) and scatter writes and you have all you need plus all as graphics api gets you.

I agree. It would be nice to see shaders be able to do the same things as CUDA so we wouldn't have to mix two different things which both use the GPU (it feels so impure). Transform feedback is a nice solid step in that direction. But, it would be nice to be able to write a convolution in a shader and have it be just as fast as the CUDA version (by using shared memory explicitly). After all, shaders should be good at that kind of thing right?

[knackered]

My word, this discussion is now referenced in the OpenGL Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#cite_note-14

[Zengar]

Wow, I feel like a part of history

[knackered]

I do hope that me putting a link back to the article that in turn links to this discussion doesn't cause a negative reality inversion, killing us all in a blaze of logic.

[bobvodka]

Won't be the first time it's happned...

[Leadwerks]

Lastly, an aside: console technology is not "obsolete". If you're a PC gamer filled with bitterness at seeing so many companies abandon your platform for consoles, you have my pity. But keep the bile off this forum.

I don't really play games. But I know that Crysis is the most graphically advanced game I have ever seen, by far. And according to Crytek the consoles don't have enough power to run the game at high settings. Consoles are already obsolete, and the gap between high-end PC performance and consoles will widen a lot more before the next generation of consoles appears.

The XBox 360 uses DirectX 9. The current version of DirectX is 10. The market is still catching up, and we won't see the effects of this for a while, but it is inarguable that console technology is behind the PC, and that discrepancy will become more significant with time.

[bobvodka]

Which is a great rant and all but you are missing a couple of key points;
1 - not everyone has a high end PC
2 - console's look 'good enough', in fact Lost Odyssey looks down right amazing (and that is UT3 based)
3 - having a constant platform makes it easier to buy games

So, sure, consoles might not have the same graphics power as the latest NV or AMD cards, but then most people don't have those cards either.

Also you don't have to deal with windows, drivers, installing, setting up and all that. Buy game, put game in, play game.

That's why people have consoles, not to have the latest tech. and frankly given the size of the console market I very much doubt anyone with a vested intrest is worried about PC. Sales figures alone back this up.

[Jan]

Crysis does look indeed pretty amazing. But it is a boring game.

In the end, all that matters, is game-play. And consoles are capable of delivering what is needed for innovative game-play (e.g. Assassin's Creed as innovative game-play and it runs well on consoles). That is only the case since that last generation of consoles, all earlier consoles were at some point the limiting factor, not only for graphics, but even for some new game-play ideas.

Consoles are limited, compared to PCs, but it seems not to be such a big issue anymore. 99% of all games are now done for consoles and then sometimes ported back to the PC. Seems the extra power that a PC can give you is not needed to realize most modern games.

The current generation of consoles will last very long, even if it is already outdated. I assume that the next generation will actually be only a PC with fixed hard- and software (not fully there, yet) and i assume it will make consoles even more popular, because i think that games are converging to some high standard, that will be difficult to top (content-wise), thus not requiring the most high-end hardware available, anymore.

Jan.