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Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware)Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware)Posted Mar 21, 2012 23:23 UTC (Wed) by slashdot (guest, #22014)In reply to: Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) by raven667 Parent article: Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware)
It is correct.
OpenGL as a whole was designed for hardware without shaders, and a fixed function pipeline with all sorts of bizarre features.
There are some subsets like OpenGL ES 2 or OpenGL 3 Core profile that better restrict it to functionality that is directly supported in hardware, but it still has flaws like requiring lots of function calls to change state, a display list implementation that is hard to really optimize, etc.
Contrast it to things like Direct3D 11 which are much simpler and map much more directly to the hardware.
There's a reason most games use DirectX, and most PlayStation3 games program the GPU directly instead of using OpenGL.
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Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) Posted Mar 22, 2012 6:34 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] There's a reason most games use DirectX, and most PlayStation3 games program the GPU directly instead of using OpenGL. Sure. That's because Microsoft controls the most popular OS and refuses to support modern versions of OpenGL (the last version guaranteed to work on Windows is 1.4 which does not support shaders at all). What this has to do with anything?
Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) Posted Mar 22, 2012 10:07 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
That makes no sense. I have significantly better OpenGL support on Windows than I do on Linux. Arguing that Windows has poor support for GL because the default implementation is decrepit and not up to dare makes as much sense as arguing that Linux has poor support for GL because the default implementation is incomplete and not up to date.
The D3D11 API is capable of several featurs that OpenGL is literally incapable of providing without breaking the API. Particularly because GL mandates a magical global hidden variable and state machine for device context access.
There's also issues regarding its object model and associated overhead, the extreme difficulty of debugging GL due to the obtuse and error-prone API, the lack of official guaranteed to be present features that are only extensions even in GL 4.2, and and a myriad of other little problems.
OpenGL certainly _works_ and gets the job done (aside from those few outright missing features, increased overhead, and general poor quality of the proprietary drivers -- the only drivers to support GL 3.1+) but D3D works _better_ and gets the job done _easier_ (aside from the lack of portability, which obviously is most critical to non-Windows debs).
Of course, the world does not need to be limited to the poorly maintained OpenGL and the vendor-specific D3D. Someone could take the lessons of D3D and the peomises of the GL Longs Peak proposals and provide a new open API that doesn't blow. Get Google and/or Apple on board and the hardware vendors would likely embrace it. It'll take years to catch on and be usable by regular app devs, but at least there's be light at the end of the tunnel.
Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) Posted Mar 22, 2012 13:51 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Arguing that Windows has poor support for GL because the default implementation is decrepit and not up to dare makes as much sense as arguing that Linux has poor support for GL because the default implementation is incomplete and not up to date. The fact that Windows includes only decrepit implementation by default means very few developers will ever dare to use OpenGL. It does not matter how OpenGL 4.2 stacks up in contest with D3D 11.1: game developers can not use OpenGL 4.2 period. I'm not saying OpenGL 4.x is ideal - far from it. But I'm saying that anyone who tries to bring relative popularity of D3D and OpenGL among the game developers as technical argument against OpenGL is willfully distorting facts.
Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) Posted Mar 22, 2012 14:29 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>What this has to do with anything?
Nothing. Nobody prevents vendors from writing accelerated OpenGL drivers. In fact, NVidia and AMD manage to do this just fine - their Windows OpenGL drivers are as good as Linux drivers.
Microsoft itself doesn't provide accelerated OpenGL drivers, but they are hardly expected to do it.
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