Valve: Steam’d Penguins [LWN.net]

Valve: Steam’d Penguins

Posted Jul 18, 2012 21:07 UTC (Wed) by daniel (subscriber, #3181)
In reply to: Valve: Steam’d Penguins by slashdot
Parent article: Valve: Steam’d Penguins

The basic problem of OpenGL is that it is a hugely bloated interface, and as a whole doesn't fit well either modern hardware or modern games. However, it generally supports all GPU features (and often more than DirectX thanks to extensions), so it's mostly a performance, correctness and ease of use problem. The fact that almost all Windows games use DirectX when they could instead use OpenGL is pretty telling (and no, there are no roadblocks to using OpenGL on Windows).

You are out of touch with recent developments. For one thing, OpenGL currently dominates 3D gaming, with the exception of the XBox walled garden and the PC segment where Microsoft narrowly failed to kill it off. Otherwise, OpenGL is completely uncontested in the rapidly growing phone and tablet market, and is also PS3 and Nintendo. No game company in their right mind would start a new project that fails to support OpenGL.

Modern OpenGL, 3.0+, has been cleanly factored into two parts: 1) a "legacy profile" that will eventually move to a separate library and 2) core OpenGL consisting of drawarrays, Vertex Buffer Objects, shader support, and various other facilities that map well to modern GPU hardware. There is no way you can describe OpenGL as bloated. It now ranks as one of the cleanest and most tightly defined libraries for anything, anywhere. And frankly, it is also very nice to have the friendly old legacy support around as an option, which in many cases is the quickest way to try out some new idea, then if it works out you put in the (modest) extra work to port it to the modern pipeline.

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Valve: Steam’d Penguins

Posted Jul 20, 2012 5:20 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

> You are out of touch with recent developments. For one thing, OpenGL currently dominates 3D gaming

Nowhere did he or anyone else claim that OpenGL wasn't widely used. What he claimed (and almost every other game developer around, including those who exclusively use OpenGL) is that OpenGL is a crappy API compared to D3D. Just like Linux nerds claim that Windows popularity has nothing to do with it having technical superiority, OpenGL's popularity has nothing to do with its having technical superiority.

> Otherwise, OpenGL is completely uncontested in the rapidly growing phone and tablet market,

So, OpenGL is the only option on those platforms, and "yay OpenGL!" D3D is the only option on XBox, and "damn you lock-in!"

> and is also PS3 and Nintendo.

Complete lie. Nintendo does NOT use OpenGL in any capacity. Not a single Nintendo console is even _capable_ of running OpenGL 2.x+, as Nintendo has never released a console with shader support (the upcoming WiiU will be their first), and the specialized hardware in the GC/Wii and the 3DS are not based on OpenGL's fixed function pipeline. PS3 does have a stripped down incomplete GL ES library, but no serious game uses it. Every real PS3 game uses a proprietary hardware-specific Sony API.

People use PS3 as a point in OpenGL's favor all the time because they read on Wikipedia that "PSGL" is a thing. Not one of these people are actual PS3 game developers. For the love of God, stop making claims on things you don't actually use in real life.