Here's a brain dump of the things that sometimes drive me crazy about OpenGL. (Note these are strictly my own opinions, not those of Valve or my coworkers. I'm also in a ranty-type mood today after grappling with OpenGL for several years now..) My major motivation to posting this: the GL API needs a reboot because IMO Mantle/D3D12 are going to most likely eat it for lunch soon, so we should start talking and thinking about this stuff now.
The driver landscape is something that any practicing GL dev must face unless you like having only a fraction of potential customers able to enjoy your product. (These are the drivers you'll have to work with in order to actually ship a product today or within the next year or so. If you're just a dev playing at home with one driver you'll probably not have to deal with any of this gritty real-world stuff.)
If all you've ever done is use D3D then you better strap yourself in because the available GL drivers for Windows/Linux are all over the map. Here's my current opinion on driver quality:
Recent examples of Nvidia GameWorks titles include Batman: Arkham Origins, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and this week’s highly anticipated Watch Dogs.
As you’re suspecting from the headline, Nvidia’s GameWorks is only good news for Nvidia, their development partners, and their GPU users. That’s logical, and it serves a sizable slice of the market. According to AMD’s Robert Hallock, it’s terrible news for the PC gaming ecosystem on the whole.
“Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40% of the market) to widen the margin in favor of NVIDIA products,” Hallock told me in an email conversation over the weekend. But wait, it stands to reason that AMD would be miffed over a competitor having the edge when it comes to graphical fidelity and features, right? Hallock explains that the core problem is deeper: “Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code—the most desirable form of optimization.”
So a partner studio like Ubisoft can suggest or write enhancements to the GameWorks libraries, but AMD isn’t allowed to see those changes or suggest their own.
“The code obfuscation makes it difficult to perform our own after-the-fact driver optimizations, as the characteristics of the game are hidden behind many layers of circuitous and non-obvious routines,” Hallock continues. “This change coincides with NVIDIA’s decision to remove all public Direct3D code samples from their site in favor of a ‘contact us for licensing’ page. AMD does not engage in, support, or condone such activities.”
eu am ura mare pe nVidia de cand au mintit in fata toti detinatorii de placi Voodoo cand au achizitionat 3DFx
am jurat ca nu voi cumpara niciodata o placa nVidia
^ ce sper ca și restul studiourilor să învețe din asta? Nu poți încerca să păcălești gamerii încercând să le vinzi un căcat pay2win (pay2play actually) deghizat într-un Free și să te aștepți să faci profit. Tragi țepe = edited.
