The ARB announced OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 today

[dor00]

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs...ate_access.txt

interesting how AMD is missing from contributors

[Mars_999]

Yeah ATI is missing from GL a lot lately, and with this new GL3.0 spec I want to know when ATI is going to get me a driver so my code will work, as of now Nvidia hardware is all I can run my code on.

[CrazyButcher]

is there any chance someone takes up on the job of making a "deprecated-removed" api + that "direct access" thing as spec?

cause those two, well presented, would have been what people sorta hoped to get, and its not like nothing happened. It's just presented poorly. Aside from the fact that it was expected to be "core", but well compromises will always happen. Let's try to present the good things better.

a spec with "red" or greyed out, parts of all to be deprecated stuff, would be a clear win. And feel less bloated, better for developers to see what to use and what not.

[Mars_999]

Screw it I am in this for the long haul, I am sticking with GL and if it dies, maybe Larrabee will be the next best thing and I can jump ship to that...

How long will my GL2.1+ code with Extensions like texture arrays work with the new GL3.0 drivers?

WHEN WILL ATI have there drivers for GL3.0 out? I need INFO!!!

[Simon Arbon]

4)... A profile encapsulates functionality needed to meet the needs of a particular market. Conformant OpenGL products may implement one or more profiles. A profile is by definition a subset of the whole core specification. The core OpenGL specification will contain all functionality, including what is in a profile, in a coherently designed whole. Profiles simply enable products for certain markets to not ship functionality that is not relevant to those markets in a well defined way.

This bit is really worrying me as it has not been explained properly.
Does this mean that if i write a CAD program that uses features normally used in games, that in 2 years i will suddenly get a hundred service calls from people with Quadro's that have just downloaded a new driver that no longer supports my profile?

What i would really like is for someone to simply confirm that everything in 3.0_Forward_Compatible is going to be included in EVERY profile, ie. it is the core feature set!

by releasing a 3.1 spec ASAP that makes it clear this stuff is gone

should also release a second PDF that simply does not contain the deprecated functionality

we need a "new features only spec" ASAP!

I certainly agree with this, it is horribly confusing trying to read a spec thats actually several overlapping specs.
This may be useful for driver writers but the developers need a separate document that describes 3.0_Forward_Compatible and is not cluttered-up with all the old stuff.

You've just said this spec is 3 times the size it needs to be and legacy support with all its burdens is now essential just to support crazy people

Yep, thats what i said.
Although they probably call themselves "Legacy application developers"

You go on to outline a nightmare that can be avoided just have 2.x and 3.x forward, no superset. It's easier, less buggy and gets everyone where they either want to be or deserve to be faster.

I am hoping that this is what they intend to do with the profiles when they introduce them, 2.x could be called the "Ludite" profile and 3.x could be the "performance" profile.

[Nighthawk]

It would habe been more honest to name this spec 2.2 and leave the name 3.0 to a future cleaned-up version without the deprecated features - that was what most people were expecting.

I don't care too much about the syntax(objects and extension), but the important features must perform fast and bug free - which is difficult to achieve when the driver is littered with legacy code.

On a sidenote, when is ATI going to expose the geometry shader in OpenGL?

[zeoverlord]

If a lot of old legacy features where deprecated but not removed until 3.1 then why call it 3.0? why not call it 2.9 or something like that and then have a clean"er" break with 3.0 which would also then introduce all the SM4 stuff.


Darn:beaten to it.

[Simon Arbon]

With the ARB basically saying that they are going to go back into hibernation for another year before releasing 3.1,
it is going to be up to ATI and NVIDIA to bring OpenGL up to date.
They are the only hope we have left.

So how about it mighty hardware vendors, when can we have extensions for the fabled ATI tesselator or Scattered writes?

Here's a quick list to include in your new 3.0 drivers:
-Geometry shader
-Tesselator
-Blend shader
-Seperate pre and post Z-discard shaders
-Post-rasterisation instancing (for multipass deferred shaders)
-Updatable resolution LOD textures
-ByteCode GLSL
-Precompiled binary save/restore
-Multi-threaded background buffer loading
-A way to query if wanted functionality is hardware supported or emulated in software

[pjmlp]

I am also still wondering if I should not switch to DX now that OpenGL 3 is another step in the direction of Glide.

I really miss all the DX support on the OpenGL side. Just look for the support given by the hardware makers. I think that the only reason ATI and NVidida still care about OpenGL is due to the CAD companies.

Just go to their developer sites and look for the amount of tools/documentation that they are providing for OpenGL and for DX.

Even NVidia that supposedly is giving the best OpenGL support, it still does not support GLSL on FXComposer!

Nah, for the time being I'll keep using OpenGL for my hobby projects but I am already planning to learn DX.

[dor00]

Thats totally true.

Even if we have 3.0, there is no support at all, not talking about support tools like DX got. "SDK" is completly missing.