Civ lead gfx engineer: "OpenGL is broken"
After the
recent rant by Rich Geldreich (Valve) now Firaxis' Joshua Barczak decided to share his thoughts on OGL too and likewise it's also not good. In the end he links to Mantle as the way to go.
Rich Geldrich has a lot to say about this subject, and I agree with pretty much everything on his list. The present state of OpenGL is incredibly frustrating, and it has caused me to be much more blunt and rhetorical than I might normally be. There are those who think that OpenGL and not D3D aught to be the primary API target for PC game development. They believe that OpenGL and D3D are basically the same and that OpenGL gaming would just take off if we developers would be more open-minded. These people are mistaken. OpenGL is a bad investment for anyone with ambitious graphical goals.
Reason #1:
OpenGL is highly fragmented across platforms. “Write-once run anywhere” is a myth. Mobile GL, Linux GL, Windows GL, and Mac GL, are all different from one another, and offer varying levels of feature support.
Reason #2:
OpenGL driver quality is highly variable, and lags abysmally behind DirectX. This is not hard to understand. DX games are the primary driver for GPU sales, so it is natural that the vendors direct their attention there. It is also, certainly, a solvable problem, but given the dominance of Windows for gaming, the IHVs have little incentive to solve it at present.
Reason #3:
The real problem is that OpenGL, as designed, is inferior to its competitors in several very important ways, which I will spend the rest of this post laying out.
GLSL Is Broken
Threading is Broken
Texture And Sampler State Are Orthogonal
Too Many Ways to Do The Same Thing
OpenGL’s Error Handling is Wrong
There Are Too Many Small Inefficiencies
indivizi afiliati nVidia, AMD au sarit in sus la afirmatiile de mai sus:
Timothy Lottes (former Nvidia dev, now at Epic):
http://timothylottes.blogspot.se/2014/0 ... roken.html
Driver Quality
Driver quality and performance problems with DX are largely hidden because hardware vendors are actively fixing things when they get early pre-release builds of major games before release and then put out driver updates when those games ship. This same process could work equally well for GL.
Valve's VOGL project is going to be a key enabler of this process in that developers will be able to send GL captures of their application directly to hardware vendors. Vendors won't need to get builds, and traces are way easier to track down and debug.
Graham Sellers (OpenGL guy at AMD):
https://twitter.com/grahamsellers/statu ... 4543174657
You know, when people _keep_ posting cr*p about what you work on every day...
ce se intampla .. acum ca Valve se reorienteaza masiv spre OpenGL, incep sa apara din ce in ce mai multe indicii (atentie, din partea developerilor) ca sistemul e "muci"
vinovati in treaba asta? Khronos Group:
http://www.khronos.org/members/promoters
- AMD
- Apple
- ARM
- Epic
- Imagination
- Intel
- Nokia* (Microsoft)
- nVidia
- Qualcomm
- Sony
- Vivante