Hi all,
I was at Siggraph last week, and I figured since I had access to all
these NVIDIA and ATI people on the show floor, I should take the
opportunity to talk to them about their OpenGL drivers and tools. Most
of the high visibility people are the game developers who mostly use
DirectX, so I wanted to make sure it was clear to them that OpenGL was
also widely used.
So I put on my best "frequent poster on the OSG mailing list" face,
starting by saying that OSG is used by a large number of big companies
in the simulation biz, some game engines, has over 2000 people on the
mailing list which means over 2000 companies use it, etc.
On the ATI side, they had a machine running a flight sim (I think it was
FlightGear) on Linux with 4 monitors. I spoke briefly to one of the
Linux driver devs who assured me they are making great strides towards
getting better Linux drivers out there. (of course they're going to say
that, but at least he knew what OSG was, which is reassuring)
On the NVIDIA side, I spoke to one of the Developer Relations guys, as
well as two tools developers. I was primarily trying to see if they
would have interest in porting NVPerfHUD to OpenGL, as it's pretty much
the coolest tool I've seen to diagnose graphics pipeline bottlenecks,
and it's free, but only supports DirectX right now. I don't know if I
actually got through, though, but at least they listened and seemed to
agree with my opinions.
The other thing I wanted to discuss was related to driver bugs. Both
sides told me they get all bug reports but obviously can't reply to all
of them. On the NVIDIA side, they told me the best address to mail is
[EMAIL PROTECTED], which is a mail list and goes to many people, but
beware of the spam filter which can be aggressive.
In both cases, though, they stated that gDebugger is an excellent tool
on the OpenGL side. I'll probably evaluate it to see if it would be
useful for us, but one thing I can see it being useful for is in showing
us how to use most of the performance counters in both NVIDIA and ATI
hardware. I think the StatsHandler could be improved to help a lot more
in diagnosing bottlenecks, and in particular the counters for ATI
hardware should be added...
One thing that's reassuring (at least to me) is that both NVIDIA and ATI
are on the OpenGL ARB, and both made strong commitments to OpenGL 3.0
support. I guess that's still PR, but I hope it will lead to better
support for the near future.
Anyways, I just wanted to report my endeavor and results, even though
they're not very conclusive... I think if we're vocal and try to explain
our way of thinking we'll eventually be heard. Unfortunately it seems to
me that OpenGL support is still just a "checkbox requirement" on a list
of requirements, and that the actual *quality* of the support doesn't
matter that much, so I hope that will change by talking to these people
when we have the chance to.
J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.cm-labs.com/
http://whitestar02.webhop.org/
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