OpenGL is Dead!!!

Hi,

I’m not sorry about the subject title. I believe OpenGL is dying.

  1. No openGL 3, when it comes (spec + drivers) it will already be obsolete and will take time to adopt.

Both AMD and Nvidia support for OpenGL is decreasing:

  1. The second major player in the graphics cards (excluding Intel) AMD/ATI has minimum support for OpenGL. No new extensions(dx10), newest developer sample is 2 years old, New tools support for OpenGL is behind.

  2. The mighty Nvidia do have support for OpenGL, but it is minimal and decreasing, No PerfHud, No GLSL shader debugger, pathetic SDK (compared to old ones, which are not available any more). Its not like they can’t make GLSL debugger(look at GLSLDevil).

When I buy the most expensive card (the latest Quadro) to use in my OpenGL application, I expect to have good development tool(on par with DirectX) I do not expect minimal support for a card costing as much as the entire system.

I know most games are created with directX, but when a company request 5x time the money for “profesional” card, It should be given as much support(tools…) as the consumer directX card.

I don’t believe there is anything that can save OpenGL, even CAD/Professional graphics suite are moving to DirectX. *nix/mac is not enough to hold it.
The only light in the end of the tunnel I see is OpenGL ES which is widely adopted.

Comments and reassurance are welcome.

Ido

Well, you seem pretty well informed.

Hold on, see what the ARB has to say in August next month. I am basically going to see what they come up with, if they give us the goods, I will stick with GL. If they BS us again, I am going to finish my current game with GL and move on to DX10 or DX11 at that time…

  1. And every target user has Vista and a G80+ / HD+ card.
  2. A significant chunk of gamers didn’t move on to consoles.

the king is dead …
long live … (or is that some song by the who),

actually sounds a bit like a piece from ‘richard the third’ by that bastard shakespeare, the king is dead, long live the …
anyways we are in the season of discontent (to bring it back to richard the third), im freezing btw.

(poetic license cause it dont appear in r3 or no shakespeare to speak of)
those that doubted, their fears will be allayed
those that flouted, their arrears will be flayed
… sorry cant come up with a kicker line (signed WS)

Mars, what are you looking for (functionally) in GL3 ?

The obvious is that the GL isn’t dead, due to its use on PS3, Mac, Linux, etc…

I am somewhat concerned with the lack of movement on the GL 3 front. I was going to use GL 3 for my new game engine, but decided not to wait, so I’m on GL 2.1, and it works fine. I have developed only on nVidia though, so I’m sure that I’ll have issues when I do ATi testing.

I feel your pain, but it’s overreacting right now, we’ll see what’s up at the Siggraph BOF.

Ido, OpenGL is a tool. If a tool doesn’t work correctly, it is more practical to use another tools. For game development (which is almost completely Windows-centered), D3D offers just more then OpenGL. This is the reason why companies like ATI/intel only provide bare minimum support: why do more work if noone uses it anyway? Maybe GL3 could change things. Let us look and see what the future holds.

If it ever get released that is, but it would be nice if there could be a little logo on games and hardware that says “openGL 3.0” and that we can define different hardware generations as openGL 3.1 class hardware in stead of today DX9 or DX10 class hardware.

On my side i switchted to raytracing anyway. I don’t really care about OpenGL3. So i could get away with software rendering all alone and SDL, but i still use OpenGL as a backend for 2D postprocessing… That’s the way to go, ain’t it? :stuck_out_tongue:

Well for starters, I want texture array support, along with GS. I have emailed Apple and put the texture array on the radar as a wish list item to be added.

I basically would be happy with GL2.1+ with Nvidias extensions they have on the G80 cores. If GL doesn’t make it to this all great Object interface this time around, I wouldn’t be heart broken, and they could push it back to GL4.0… I think that features of DX10 need to thrown in GL soon, so it doesn’t get left behind, on the next game development cycle.

Reason I am so upset anymore is, people are jumping ship to DX10, ATI support sucks for GL and yes I am looking at you FBO/PBO/No DX10 extensions, which if they are working on GL3 than I guess this is understandable, and Nvidia and ATI spend to much time making great apps for DX while GL gets left out.

Now Apple has some nice tools for Profiling, but IIRC they are not up to date with the latest GL specs… Been many years ago I used them at The Apple Game Programming Summit back in 2003-2004?

If OpenGL had died every time people made these predictions, it would have been gone many years ago. The truth is that it will exist as long as it offers value to software developers and hardware vendors.

You may argue that it should be better, more competitive, etc. I don’t disagree, but it is currently better than the alternatives for a certain class of applications and on some platforms no alternative exists anyway.

The reincarnation of pure software rendering may wind up being a bigger threat to OpenGL than any other competing API in the end, but even in that scenario, developers would probably want to do a lot of their rendering through an OpenGL-like API.