Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi Ulrich- Ulrich Hertlein wrote: On 25/3/09 1:07 AM, Paul Melis wrote: graphics performance was on very expensive Unix workstations. These days, the best performing graphics cards are for Windows and they are relatively inexpensive. I think that's why some CAD packages are dropping OpenGL support (Autodesk- I'm looking at you). Are they dropping OpenGL support for their 3D modeling packages as well (especially Maya)? Or just the autocad stuff? On the other end of the spectrum they (autodesk) have ported Lustre (one of their color grading products) to Linux and somehow I doubt they're using a D3D wrapper... You know, this is what drives me crazy about Autodesk and their support of D3D. They use HOOPS in lots (most?) of their products. In fact, Tech Soft 3D (the maker of HOOPS) was spun out of Autodesk. HOOPS is renderer agnostic and I know that it works as well with OpenGL as D3D (at least on XP, Vista may be different) and is cross platform. I suspect the reasons for not support OpenGL in some of their products has to do with support costs and marketing agreements with Microsoft. Probably mostly the latter... Cory ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hello, The only suggestion I can give in this matter is to compare performance with tools that already support both OGL and DX. I hope I'm not a sinner mentioning OGRE. I'm not familiar with OGRE but if someone knows that library as well as OSG, it is possible to build a set of programs comparing different features between these libraries when OGRE using OGL. Then it is possible to run all these OGRE programs, now using DX on windows platform and this could give an assumption of the performance improvement for OSG on windows platforms if using OGL-DX mapping. Guy. - Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.or g ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi, Jean-Sébastien Guay wrote: Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. What always bothers me is the whole multiple window, multiple context thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought DirectX caters more for the single fullscreen 3D window case (games?). Is this not why CAD apps favour OpenGL? If DX can't do multiple windows/contexts nicely the wrapper won't be able to fix this. For specific cases the wrapper might be OK. jp J-S -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
J.P. Delport wrote: What always bothers me is the whole multiple window, multiple context thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought DirectX caters more for the single fullscreen 3D window case (games?). Is this not why CAD apps favour OpenGL? If DX can't do multiple windows/contexts nicely the wrapper won't be able to fix this. For specific cases the wrapper might be OK. I don't believe multiple windows/contexts is a problem anymore (was it ever?). I think CAD apps traditionally favored OpenGL simply because of their history. Way back (when SGI was relevant), the only place to get decent graphics performance was on very expensive Unix workstations. These days, the best performing graphics cards are for Windows and they are relatively inexpensive. I think that's why some CAD packages are dropping OpenGL support (Autodesk- I'm looking at you). Cory ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi, Cory Riddell wrote: J.P. Delport wrote: What always bothers me is the whole multiple window, multiple context thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought DirectX caters more for the single fullscreen 3D window case (games?). Is this not why CAD apps favour OpenGL? If DX can't do multiple windows/contexts nicely the wrapper won't be able to fix this. For specific cases the wrapper might be OK. I don't believe multiple windows/contexts is a problem anymore (was it ever?). Must be my built-in OpenGL bias then :). I think CAD apps traditionally favored OpenGL simply because of their history. Way back (when SGI was relevant), the only place to get decent graphics performance was on very expensive Unix workstations. These days, the best performing graphics cards are for Windows and they are relatively inexpensive. I do remember a time (when PC workstations appeared) when cards touted OpenGL support on their boxes specifically for CAD apps. I think that's why some CAD packages are dropping OpenGL support (Autodesk- I'm looking at you). :( Cory ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Cory Riddell wrote: J.P. Delport wrote: What always bothers me is the whole multiple window, multiple context thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought DirectX caters more for the single fullscreen 3D window case (games?). Is this not why CAD apps favour OpenGL? If DX can't do multiple windows/contexts nicely the wrapper won't be able to fix this. For specific cases the wrapper might be OK. I don't believe multiple windows/contexts is a problem anymore (was it ever?). I think CAD apps traditionally favored OpenGL simply because of their history. Way back (when SGI was relevant), the only place to get decent graphics performance was on very expensive Unix workstations. These days, the best performing graphics cards are for Windows and they are relatively inexpensive. I think that's why some CAD packages are dropping OpenGL support (Autodesk- I'm looking at you). Are they dropping OpenGL support for their 3D modeling packages as well (especially Maya)? Or just the autocad stuff? Regards, Paul ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi J.P., What always bothers me is the whole multiple window, multiple context thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought DirectX caters more for the single fullscreen 3D window case (games?). Is this not why CAD apps favour OpenGL? If DX can't do multiple windows/contexts nicely the wrapper won't be able to fix this. For specific cases the wrapper might be OK. I'm not sure that's accurate. For example, I think some 3D modeling apps use D3D for their 3D windows, without any problems. There are flags when creating a DC (device context) that specify whether it should be fullscreen or use an existing HWND as container. (although it's been a while since I've done D3D programming, this is only by memory) J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
On 25/3/09 1:07 AM, Paul Melis wrote: graphics performance was on very expensive Unix workstations. These days, the best performing graphics cards are for Windows and they are relatively inexpensive. I think that's why some CAD packages are dropping OpenGL support (Autodesk- I'm looking at you). Are they dropping OpenGL support for their 3D modeling packages as well (especially Maya)? Or just the autocad stuff? On the other end of the spectrum they (autodesk) have ported Lustre (one of their color grading products) to Linux and somehow I doubt they're using a D3D wrapper... /ulrich ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
[osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi all, About the recent discussion about trying to make a wrapper around OpenGL that would forward calls to Direct3D, in a recent post I said I had found info about SciTech's GLDirect, which was open sourced and integrated into the Mesa code repository. Well, recently Pat Wood (who is not a subscriber to this list but got wind of my searching) sent along this info. (see below for the full message) I think the GLDirect code is pretty much dead in the Mesa code repository - it doesn't seem to be kept up to date and there are probably some improvements that could be made to make it perform better. I wonder if we could put together a working group of OSG users that could take over the code, get it to work and update it so it could at least give us an idea of what such a wrapper would look like and how it would perform on modern machines and graphics cards. Is there any interest in such a working group? I've never done driver development myself (apart from a little thing that would control an ADC and stepper motor through the parallel port back in the DOS days) but I'd be happy to lend a hand if there's something I can help with. We'd need some more knowledgeable people if we want this to take off. Thoughts? J-S - Forwarded message from Pat Wood pat.w...@efi.com - Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:34:39 -0700 From: Pat Wood pat.w...@efi.com Reply-To: Pat Wood pat.w...@efi.com Subject: Mesa and gldirect To: Jean-Sebastien Guay jean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com I've been playing around with the gldirect5 version of mesa (essentially, the code that SciTech released), which is integrated into mesa 6 (GL 1.1). I saw the dx7/8/9 directories in Mesa 7.3 and am thinking of taking on the task of updating the gldirect code to work with it (I believe the gldirect code hasn't been updated for some time). This code might be very useful, since a lot of non-nVidia OpenGL implementations have lots of problems, are old 1.2 or 1.3 APIs, or just don't work. In particular, we're using Ogre for one of our products, and it doesn't play well with non-compliant GL implementations. As for performance, it's about 2.5x slower than the native GL on my GeForce 8600GT, and almost the same speed as the native GL on my laptop with a Mobility Radeon 9000. Shaders are handled by translating GLSL to the DirectX 9 shader language HLSL. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me. I'm not a member on the OpenSceneGraph Forum. Pat - End forwarded message - -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello, Jean-Sébastien Guay wrote: Hi all, ... Is there any interest in such a working group? I've never done driver development myself (apart from a little thing that would control an ADC and stepper motor through the parallel port back in the DOS days) but I'd be happy to lend a hand if there's something I can help with. We'd need some more knowledgeable people if we want this to take off. Thoughts? J-S Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Not to mention that you will be chasing moving targets - both D3D and the GPU APIs. Regards, Jan -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJx9W/n11XseNj94gRAtrmAKDw755Bqbc45A0CLE1NhSBkYD25DgCfUI7N UXR2Oy84tjBrjJKoquriWrU= =T6gv -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Jan Ciger wrote: I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Not to mention that you will be chasing moving targets - both D3D and the GPU APIs. There are video cards with good D3D drivers and crappy OpenGL drivers. I can see why it might be nice to have the option of sitting on top of D3D. It's entirely possible that performance could be better going through an optimized D3D driver rather than directly through a crappy OpenGL driver. I don't understand why putting another layer between OSG and the hardware would result in having to chase GPU API's? Are you writing code that goes around OpenGL? Cory Riddell ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi Jan, J-S et. al, On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Jan Ciger jan.ci...@gmail.com wrote: Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. I do think this is a factor, our first interest should be in getting 1st class support for OpenGL drivers across all hardware on all OS's. Even if there is a viable OpenGL - D3D wrapper we shouldn't rest on putting pressure on the hardware vendors to write better drivers. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Not to mention that you will be chasing moving targets - both D3D and the GPU APIs. I see there are three reasons to investigate the OpenGL subset - D3D mapping: 1) Trying to convince a 3rd party company to put money into OpenGL driver development is not easy, and if successful the results might well be patchy and take some time to come in effect. Having a OpenGL subset - D3D wrapper could help those that need a solution right now. 2) Porting to XBox + XBox 360, thereby making it possible to port OSG applications to these consoles without major retooling of the OSG app or OSG itself. 3) Takes the pressure off the OSG itself having to support D3D, so the bulk of the OSG devs and community can remain focused on the OpenGL family of API's. Big questions for us will be how pratical is to to take over maintenance of GLDirect. GLDirect being dormant right now suggests that it's not enough of an itch to enough people to keep it alive. Is it because GLDirect was never good enough/badly architected? Is it because developers just caved in an wrote to D3D directly? Or is because developed just found that OpenGL worked well enough anyway?It would be interesting finding out the history and the dynamics of the library and it's code base so that those thinking about contributing can avoid making the same mistakes. At this stage I guess it would be worth a few hardy souls checking out the code base and doing a test to see what GLDirect is capable of and the state of the code base. Quick checks like how much code is it, can it be easily built would be worth doing as well. One thing we can possible help out on the OSG side would be to consider making a profile in OSG-3.0 that provides a subset of OpenGL that simplifies the task of implementing and mataining GLDirect. For instance if we have seperate rendering backends (profiles) for OpenGL 1.x, OpenGL 2.x, OpenGL 3.x and OpenGL-ES, then a OpenGL 1.x or OpenGL 2.x subset might be easy to introduce. Robert. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
There's a very simple answer to the ATI problem: don't buy ATI. Seriously, their poor OpenGL support has been well-known for at least seven years, if not longer. In light of this knowledge, why do people keep buying ATI cards for OpenGL use? It just doesn't make any sense. Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com +1 303 859 9466 -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Sébastien Guay Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 2:04 PM To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Cory Riddell wrote: There are video cards with good D3D drivers and crappy OpenGL drivers. I can see why it might be nice to have the option of sitting on top of D3D. It's entirely possible that performance could be better going through an optimized D3D driver rather than directly through a crappy OpenGL driver. I think it would be better to put pressure on the vendor to fix their driver instead of removing the only incentive for them to do so. I don't understand why putting another layer between OSG and the hardware would result in having to chase GPU API's? Are you writing code that goes around OpenGL? No, but you will chase changing DirectX APIs. And those are not standardized and changing whenever Microsoft feels like it. So your driver will by necessity lag behind whatever the vendors and Microsoft will provide. Jan -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJyAC5n11XseNj94gRAiJgAJwMeQNSSTdKDccePfWFMr5VPu3q+QCg3N0l aQWblhdLuskUe+237DYnwDc= =sRyT -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
In situations where your customer has bought hardware for another primary use (try tens of thousands of laptops), ATI or even Intel wins out over Nvidia on cost it seems. Then we are stuck with integrated graphics, and poor drivers. Where the developer has a choice of hardware, just saying no to ATI makes sense. When your hardware is dictated, you have to do whatever you can. I have never used Direct3D/DirectX and don't know a thing about it. Maybe we are on the losing end of this battle. Chris -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Paul Martz Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 3:48 PM To: 'OpenSceneGraph Users' Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] There's a very simple answer to the ATI problem: don't buy ATI. Seriously, their poor OpenGL support has been well-known for at least seven years, if not longer. In light of this knowledge, why do people keep buying ATI cards for OpenGL use? It just doesn't make any sense. Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com +1 303 859 9466 -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Sébastien Guay Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 2:04 PM To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Jean-Sébastien Guay wrote: Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Exactly. But if you give an incentive to a vendor to drop that support (you have emulated driver available! - very attractive from the costs point of view), then the non-windows camp is screwed. Remember the thing Microsoft tried to do for Vista? They tried to implement what you are proposing - a limited version of OpenGL sitting on top of D3D. Especially ATI would be only eager to drop OpenGL support if they didn't have industry on their back. Making this job easier for them is going to only cost us in the long term. Or do you seriously think that they would keep OpenGL support on Linux (a very niche platform for them) if they would be able to drop it for Windows? I think that this would only contribute to decline of OpenGL support in general by the vendors, because even the majority market wouldn't need decent drivers any more. Regards, Jan -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJyAMUn11XseNj94gRAqM5AJ42SlzHu8FGLdAw0ZOGGLzR7Pa9dwCgliU9 JPu7+wiwjP9P1y2BVXi9jIc= =rVI1 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Dorosky, Christopher G wrote: In situations where your customer has bought hardware for another primary use (try tens of thousands of laptops), ATI or even Intel wins out over Nvidia on cost it seems. Then we are stuck with integrated graphics, and poor drivers. Where the developer has a choice of hardware, just saying no to ATI makes sense. When your hardware is dictated, you have to do whatever you can. I have never used Direct3D/DirectX and don't know a thing about it. Maybe we are on the losing end of this battle. Seriously, do you think that low-end ATI/Intel hw in those laptops will work in a decent way even with D3D? The problem is the hw there, not the drivers ... Integrated graphics simply doesn't work for 3D except for very basic stuff and the driver will be the least of your problems. You will be hard pressed to find any recent game running on integrated Intel GPUs. And that is pure D3D, not a layer of emulation on top of it. You do not go racing Formula 1 cars with a Trabant or Yugo ... Regards, Jan -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJyAQbn11XseNj94gRArvBAJ0fd7YsuqUjwkUKpPTaWfSUelQAVwCcCFtd S2ebqcbSGoLZRq0WvSuI5Vk= =A4XG -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect]
Customers should not expect to run software on systems that the software vendor did not recommend and certify. Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com +1 303 859 9466 -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Dorosky, Christopher G Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 3:43 PM To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] In situations where your customer has bought hardware for another primary use (try tens of thousands of laptops), ATI or even Intel wins out over Nvidia on cost it seems. Then we are stuck with integrated graphics, and poor drivers. Where the developer has a choice of hardware, just saying no to ATI makes sense. When your hardware is dictated, you have to do whatever you can. I have never used Direct3D/DirectX and don't know a thing about it. Maybe we are on the losing end of this battle. Chris -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Paul Martz Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 3:48 PM To: 'OpenSceneGraph Users' Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] There's a very simple answer to the ATI problem: don't buy ATI. Seriously, their poor OpenGL support has been well-known for at least seven years, if not longer. In light of this knowledge, why do people keep buying ATI cards for OpenGL use? It just doesn't make any sense. Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com +1 303 859 9466 -Original Message- From: osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org [mailto:osg-users-boun...@lists.openscenegraph.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Sébastien Guay Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 2:04 PM To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: Re: [osg-users] [Fwd: Mesa and gldirect] Hi Jan, Honestly, I think this will be counterproductive. It will only give companies an excuse to neglect OpenGL support further or to drop it completely (You can use the emulation!). The latter would be disastrous for all non-Microsoft platforms. Since the OpenGL over Direct3D layer will only work on Microsoft platforms for obvious reasons, I don't see how this will affect other platforms at all. If some developer wants to do 3D on Linux, they have to use OpenGL. Basically, this is a follow-up to an earlier discussion (a rather long and heated one as I recall) saying that there were two ways to improve the OSG experience on Windows platforms or for ATI/AMD hardware, where OpenGL drivers are pretty bad compared to nVidia: 1. Demand better OpenGL support in drivers (which may be hard and does not depend on us, i.e. we can ask but we have no control over the result) 2. Create a technological solution, of which an OpenGL over Direct3D layer is one example. Of course, it would be much preferable if vendors would, out of their own volition, improve OpenGL driver quality on Windows. However, since most games run on Direct3D, there is little incentive for them to do this. In most markets where OpenGL support is important, the software is already cross-platform, and thus moving to Linux is less of an issue. This means that the situation with OpenGL driver quality on Windows is likely to get worse as developers who depend on OpenGL move to other platforms and stop demanding good OpenGL driver quality. I fail to see the benefits of such move - why to run OpenGL on top of Direct3D? Is there *any* usable hardware that has only D3D drivers and does not support OpenGL? Perhaps not, but for most hardware which has Direct3D support, the Direct3D driver quality is higher than the OpenGL driver quality on Windows (either in speed, number of serious/show-stopper bugs, etc.). There's a big difference between supporting OpenGL and supporting it *well*, and since there are no enforced conformance tests, vendors can support it only partly if they want... Basically, I'm trying to find a way so that OpenGL apps can run well on Windows, independent of what vendor made the graphics card. Since there is a large pool of Direct3D applications on Windows, making OpenGL calls go through Direct3D before getting to the video card driver might be one way of doing that. Of course, this is all theoretical, we can't know what the trade-offs are until we get a prototype running. And in any case, I'm just relaying info I got, seeing as this discussion was raised before. If the majority of people don't see the benefit, nothing will come of it and it'll just die, and we'll just go on as we have in the past. J-S -- __ Jean-Sebastien Guayjean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg
