Thomas Kumlehn wrote:
Bad news ?
According to a SIGGRAPH anouncement, OpenGL 3.0 will abandon the
fixed function pipeline. No glBegin / glEnd anymore.
Does this bother/scare anyone - more familiar with OGL and OG than me ?
Thomas Kumlehn
PIXEL PARTNER (R)
Member of the http://www.XING.com network
The goal of OpenGL 3 is to clear out a lot of accumulated
crud left over from the early 1990s original design, which
was well matched to the hardware (and coding styles) of
the time but not now. (Clearing away the mistakes of the
past to make room for the exciting new mistakes of the
future.) For people starting new projects, going to OpenGL
3 means better performance on future hardware at the expense
of backwards compatibility with existing code. OpenGL 1/2
libraries, and the SDKs, will still be around for a good
few years to handle all the existing programs.
Abandoning the fixed function pipeline is just recognition
that all the action is happening with programmable GPUs
now. Since not everyone is writing shaders though, OGL 3
will initialise the graphics hardware with shaders that
emulate the original OpenGL pipeline. People who write
OpenGL 1.X code, eg for OGC 1, won't notice any difference.
Same for glBegin/glEnd blocks being removed. In the early
90s it made sense to transfer vertex attributes (xyz coords,
tex coords, etc) to the graphics hardware immediately they
were available, ie each glVertex call. Now we have an order
of magnitude more RAM, it makes sense to buffer an entire
glBegin/glEnd block into a vertex array or vertex buffer
object and send it in one block. With most OpenGL systems
already doing this internally, removing glBegin/glEnd is
just hitting us programmers with the clue stick :-) But
again, people who write for OGC 1 won't be affected.
OpenGL 3.0 is further confirmation if any were needed that
OGC 2 will have to be a GPU, but it doesn't affect version
1. The tech spec for the first card is 'good enough' for
the most common 2D/3D code but was never intended to be
state of the art.
As Douglas Adams would say in a bad Russian accent, not
to be panicking, fellow comrades in struggle for freedom!
--
Hugh Fisher
DCS, ANU
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