OpenGL - why even bother

I love opengl. Unfortunately the handwriting is on the wall.

  1. DirectX 10 and Vista is the future(2007 and beyond) for games.

  2. Khronos is for turning OpenGL into an embedded
    devices API.

“I can see so clearly now…”

Well, DirectX 10 Features are already available with OpenGL on WindowsXP and Linux (don´t know about MacOSX). Also, considering all the DRM crap and other things in Vista currently some companies will not use Vista in the near future. So at least in the professional sector, OpenGL will probably last for quite some time.

DirectX 10 and Vista is the future(2007 and beyond) for games.
Playstation 3 does not have DX10 capable GPU.
XBox 360 has something between DX9 and DX10.
Besides, Unreal Engine 3 is what we will see in 2007 very often. And that’s DX9.
I’m not buying Vista anytime soon (I would prefer not to buy it at all, but the day may come when I’ll have to). Certainly not during next 2-3 years. That means I won’t buy any DX10 games.

Besides, as CaseMillennium wrote, DX10 features are allready available in OpenGL, so OpenGL developers won’t stay behind DX10 developers.

  1. Khronos is for turning OpenGL into an embedded devices API.
    You mean that Khronos wants the OpenGL to become #1 API on mobile devices, right? That doesn’t mean it will not continue to evolve on desktop machines.

No reason at all you should bother with it. I suggest you spend your time studying Java - the programming language of the future.
:wink:

in the future, i dont think i have microsoft on my pc anymore…

  1. DirectX 10 and Vista is the future(2007 and beyond) for games.
    You could easily have said that DirectX 9 was the future for games. Direct3D has always been popular for games, regardless of the version.

This argument does not get stronger just because DX10 is Vista-only. Indeed, it gets weaker because of that.

  1. Khronos is for turning OpenGL into an embedded devices API.
    Tin foil hatting , are we?

What exactly is it that makes you think that Khronos needs to use OpenGL for an embedded devices API when they already have OpenGL ES? And plenty of support for it?

We’ve heard that since D3D started limping along. OpenGL is still the only cross platform game in town.

Khronos is also not turning OpenGL into a mobile API. OpenGL ES is mobile, OpenGL is desktop, with SGI sinking khronos has absorbed the ARB, but each API still has two distinct specifications and separate working groups. If there was convergence it would mostly eliminate legacy rendering paths & fixed function stuff and make it less likely you’d implement inefficient code. It would not make the desktop API an embeded one, you could actually do a lot worse than an OpenGL ES 2.0 style API is you’ve ever taken the time to look at it. Basically your post is flat wrong on a number of levels.

Want to know what’s dropped in DX 10? Caps bits, that’s right! How long have we heard that they’re indispensible! This and Vista being DX9 will mean DX10 will be slow for adoption IMHO. In anycase not an issue for OpenGL.

Who needs FUD when you have fools to just post crap when they don’t know what they’re talking about.

OpenGL will outlast DirectX 11, 12 and 13, it’s just silly to buy into this FUD at any version. The FUD never changes and neither does the reality, it is simply in hardware manufacturers interests to support OpenGL. Who do you think is on the khronos working groups? Who do you think creates OpenGL? Companies like NVIDIA & ATI, they draw up the specification and of course implement it & release the drivers, they have hardware to sell and they define the API to expose that hardware capability, this will not change. This is clearer now than ever before because SGI isn’t there for the FUDmeisters to point at. Khronos is just a organizational entity for this collaboration, no real business to speak of.

Amen, I love GL! :slight_smile:

Dorbie: Interessting, that you don’t post for such a long time and then the first post you do again is on such a silly thread.

Anyways, welcome back.
Jan.