Hi Cory, On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Cory Riddell <c...@codeware.com> wrote: > Everybody is talking like there aren't any high performance cross-API scene > graphs nor could one be made. They do exist and they are expensive.
I haven't personally suggested this, but I have talked about the technical trade-offs involved. > I've also seen a bunch of messages dismissing the gamer market to make the > argument that OpenGL is big everywhere else and thus D3D doesn't matter. > Well, the last statistics I've seen has the gaming industry an order of > magnitude larger than everything else; I wouldn't ignore it. Well the gaming market is very big, BUT the gaming market isn't just Windows/D3D, its much bigger than that. The Wii and Playstation2 have been the big consoles of the last ten years, neither of which have anything to do with D3D. MS would like to associate gaming with exclusivie use of D3D but this is just a marketing ploy. One has to ask the question what platforms you want to deliver your products on, and how to efficiently deliver those products to those platforms. D3D is only one way of delivering it under Windows, and the support matrix for different versions of D3D is rather convoluted, such as D3D10 only being available on 10% of the OSG's community machines, while OpenGL2.x+extensions with similar feature set as D3D 10 is available on 100% of the OSG's communities machines. For instance right now an OSG application right now can deliver a more advanced graphics application under WindowsXP than any Direct3D developer can. If you care about gaming then surely this is good thing. The only thing holding the OSG back in this instance is not being tied to OpenGL, but the lack of quality and feature set of OpenGL drivers from some vendors i.e. Intel + ATI. > I'm not working > on a game, but I do recognize that I can write a fast, cheap 3d app because > the technology has been pushed so hard by gamers. With more money being > spent on D3D hardware, I wouldn't be too quick to write it off. It's just hardware, it isn't D3D hardware, again we have to be careful not to tricked by the MS marketing. Microsoft has helped control the hardware specs via it's D3D API's, but it hasn't created the hardware, neither has the grame developers. It's ATI and NVidia that have created the solutions for the games market under Windows, D3D was not the catalyst for this push, it was just one of ingredients in the mix. Take D3D out of the mix and place OpenGL more centrally and would have got pretty well the same hardware advances. Take the games market out of the mix and yes, we would have been unlikely to see such advances. In terms of the OSG community, we do need to make sure that we stay good at what we are good at - we are the defacto standard scene graph is vis-sim, VR and GIS markets. Spending too much time courting a difficult market to crack into could easily make us loose focus on existing user bases needs and up failing to crack the new markets and in existing markets where we are strong. > BTW- I know very little of the two API's and I don't particularly want to > know any more (I only know what Wikipedia tells me: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D). OSG is > invaluable to me because it takes care of details that I don't want to worry > about and lets me work at a higher level. If the layer on top of OpenGL gets > too thin and I have to learn a lot about the underlying API, then that layer > isn't valuable to someone like me. I sounds like the OSG hits quite a good balance for yourself so far - provides enough functionality to do your job without worry about the details such as the thin API abstraction. By contast Paul Martz at the start of thread emphasised that the thinness of the layer above OpenGL that the OSG provides is one of it's main selling points. To be able to satisfy two different types of users needs/desires means that we've been successful. The challenge now is how to retain these qualities whilst moving the paradigm of state management further on into full dynamic shader composition, and handling these disparate API's at the rendering backend. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
