First of all, let me apologise.
Reading what I wrote, it looks more than very critical and cynical. I can only explain it by: the post was written under the influence of much frustration.
cass,
Thank you (very much). I (really) expected nothing less from nvidia, but your initial words got me worried. While I feel I shoudn’t have had to apply this pressure, at least your comment put my worries to rest about nvidia’s committment to OpenGL, why it at least served its purpose.
Should other vendors (e.g ATI, Intel or 3DLabs) care to also state “we also expect to add FBO support for all cards supporting pbuffers” I’m sure many exisiting and potential future customers would appreciate your committment to OpenGL.
Korval,
your opinion makes me think of a gfx manufacturing company’s perfect customer - not caring the least for the millions upon millions of customers of already installed hardware systems where FBO could really, seriously, and to no little extent increase the speed, reduce delays or even allow interoperability, but instead only say “buy new, new, new”.
You might also not think of game producers still caring about customers, that might add FBO as a “patch” to their games currently forced to exclusivley use pbuffer. If such a “patch” made them graphics compatible between Win32, Xwindows and Mac OS X, they might even consider porting input and sound to SDL and OpenAL, and get into previously not experienced markets.
If one is only thinking of only the most 3D graphic intensive games, only people having the latest-and-greatest hardware would benefit from FBO. But then, why would ARB even have mentioned pbuffers in the spec?
I wrote something to the effect “I’d expect FBO to be supported on anything from TNT and ATI 7000”.
To again quote cass:
“I would expect support on all the hardware we support pbuffers on”.
I’d say cass isn’t “expecting” this on a whim, but on actual knowledge of what is required and supported by the hardware. If “chip 1.0 anno 1998” supports pbuffers, it can also support (a subset of) FBO.
Korval then wrote:
The specific need for FBO on older hardware is weak at best.
Then, at best, specific need for pbuffer has also always been weak. After all, FBO is among other things the replacement for pbuffer.
If pbuffer has been enough, then surely the same (limited) FBO support can’t be a step in the wrong direction.
I think Jeff McWilliams post explains the rest.