Hi Robert,
We are still a long way from having genuine choice about hardware and software though. MS has a tremendously right grip on almost every PC manufacturer save for Apple and the specialist Linux firms. The only easy way of matching the hardware your want with the OS you want is build it yourself, this obviously isn't what the average users wants to do.
You would want manufacturers to offer a choice of OS when buying a PC? Non tech-savvy people won't know what to choose between Linux, Windows, etc. when they buy a PC, so pushing the choice all the way down to them doesn't make sense. They'll just go with whatever has the most publicity on TV or something, and we'll be right where we started.
This are certainly getting better, but there is still a massive way to go in getting the playing field levelled.
Massive I don't know. It's much better than it was, and I think we only need a bit more of a push to get to where competition is healthy and everyone has an equal chance.
I think the trend for browsers is a wider one. None Windows OS's are certainly on the rise too, but no where near the penetration of non Windows OS's we see in our browser stats. This probably reflects that nature of the applications that OSG users develop, and perhaps the fact that tech savy users are more able to understand and act upon their preferred choice of OS.
Agreed.
Some places competition is good, but not typically in the area of standards. OpenGL is an open standard, Direct3D is a close standard that is pushed my a monopoly with the explicit intent of destroying its competing open standard. If Direct3D hadn't existing we'd have vendors competing between quality of their OpenGL drivers, instead we have them competing primarily in Direct3D performance/quality, and OpenGL drivers from most vendors have sadly seemed to play a very distant second in priority. It really isn't a huge waste of hardware vendors time having to work on two separate HAL's for their hardware, it's a idotic situation and an extremely bad engineering solution to a problem in hand. The find it very hard to reconcile the view that competition between OpenGL and Direct3D is beneficial. One only has to point to Intel and ATI OpenGL as clear proof of the damage that is has done.
I don't agree with you on that. OpenGL is an API. Direct3D is an API. They're not "standards"... If a video card manufacturer wants a good market share in most areas, they'll support both and support them well. If they focus on whatever market D3D caters to, they'll focus on D3D support.
Now, if one graphics API were really standard, kind of like x86 assembly, then we could have one that all video cards talk and have "compilers" that would compile OpenGL and D3D programs for that assembly language. As far as I know that's what the video card drivers do anyways, so having competition between OpenGL and D3D is kind of like competition between C and Pascal (say) and I see nothing bad with that. Pick what you want to pick and makes sense for your projects. It's how to determine "what makes sense for your projects" that's hard, but I expect there were similar discussions back when C++ was a young language.
ATI OpenGL is a specific case, their D3D drivers were very bad at one point too (heck, even their 2D Windows drivers would crash the machine at one point!), and I guess they wanted to improve D3D before working on OpenGL. Which they are apparently doing - I saw FlightGear running on a multi-display ATI-based set up running Linux (therefore OpenGL) at Siggraph 2008 and it ran very well. It was on public display at ATI's booth, so presumably they want to publicize that they're working on their OpenGL/Linux drivers. Sure it's just one example, but I think it's getting better.
Intel is another special case: most of their integrated display hardware has no accelerated 3D support, period! So I don't think you can say they have bad OpenGL support... Hopefully Larrabee changes that.
Anyways... Opinions, opinions... :-) J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
