Has anybody seen the Siggraph 2008 slides presented on the frontpage? (http://www.opengl.org/news/permalink/mod…08_course_slide)
I’ve been scrolling a bit through these slides and saw a section describing the future of OpenGL (slides 170 to 204). When reading this it looks like nVidia doesn’t really agree with the current direction of OpenGL, a quote:
Part of OpenGL 3.0 is a marking of features for deprecation[ul][li]LOTS of functionality is marked for deprecation[]I contend no real application today uses the non-deprecated subset of OpenGL—all apps would have to change due to deprecation[/ul]Some vendors believe getting rid of features will make OpenGL better in some way[ul][]NVIDIA does not believe in abandoning API compatibility this way[/ul]OpenGL is part of a large ecosystem so removing features this way undermines the substantial investment partners have made in OpenGL over years[ul][*]API compatibility and stability is one of OpenGL’s great strengths[/ul][/li]
What do they suggest instead? Improved display lists: using multiple cpu cores to build display lists in parallel (letting a single thread execute the display lists). According to nVidia we really need display lists now and improve them, making them more flexible (instead of depricating them). They want the driver to optimize the executing order of frequently used display lists.
Other things mentioned: let OpenGL have more Direct3D capabilities to make conversion easier (like removing the need to link shaders into a program, so that shaders can be used more flexible).
These are only some points from the slides. Some things (like the slide about the deprecation model) made me frown upon, other things make sense and some other I don’t know yet what to think about. What do you think about the suggestions made in the slides? What could be useful, what isn’t useful at all?
To me it looks like nVidia doesn’t like the current path OpenGL is taking… maybe I misunderstood this from the slides… but I wonder how large the differences in opinions are between different Khronos members.