Hi J-S, On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Jean-Sébastien Guay <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Please go check out the the specs on OpenGL. It is a open standard. It's up to vendors to create OpenGL drivers to this standard. It's not an API like the OSG is an API, OpenGL is a standard with an standardised API. It's a standard that is derived from a standards body - this is what Khronos is all about. > 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. I'm afraid you have not grasped what OpenGL is about. It's a standardised hardware abstraction layer. It's meant to solve the problem of targeting multiple hardware types across multiple platforms so application developers don't have to worry about the platform specifics, they just write to the standard and it works. Having two competing standards that address the same job is very rarely a healthy phenomenon. It just fragments and breaks down interoperability. It also spreads drivers writing too thinly. It's been a case of divide an conquer, MS have used their monopoly clout to marginalize OpenGL as much as they could. The quality of OpenGL drivers has very clearly been harmed by this. > 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. ATI and Intel two special cases of poor OpenGL support? We'll that only leaves one mainstream vendor that provides acceptable OpenGL drives, and it make it the exception to the rule - so surely NVidia is the special case here, not ATI and Intel. > Anyways... Opinions, opinions... :-) The fact is that the majority of our graphics vendors produce OpenGL drivers that we as community universally regard as being not good enough. This is not good for us, it's not good for our end users it's not good for the hardware vendors. It become speculation/opinion and the exact cause of this situation. >From my perspective the only beneficiary of this situation is MS, something that it engineered by using is monopoly position to push Direct3D and sideline OpenGL. Knowing how we got to just point can certainly help to refine how we go about trying to redress it, which is why I think it's important to look at this recently history with unclouded vision. What I really really want is for use to have high quality OpenGL drivers, in a perfect world open sourced ones so we can fix them and support them directly. Once we get this, then we have level playing field, and there on whole topic of Direct3D will be an irrelevance. We still have to struggle to get to this point though, and unfortunately it's us that can directly make it happen. The best we can do is try to influence the commitment to OpenGL from hardware vendors, either directly or through wider support for OpenGL. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
