Is this the end of OpenGL on windows? I think unless everyone on the OpenGL ARB get together and refuse to provide ICD’s for win vista until OpenGL is promoted to a first class API MS will finally kill OpenGL.
Allegedly:
“Update 3: EASY TO USE
With Vista Microsoft wants to eliminate the long installation procedures that PC games have. Installing and playing a game should be as easy as with a console. They too are developing a special driver manager, so you won’t have any problems with different drivers.”
…so, Sun’s several-year lead on decent game-shipping is about to be ripped away and replaced with something from a company with the brains to do something useful with it?
not good…
Will.
I was hoping this was just a rumor but a 3DLabs employee just confirmed it. Not good at all.
Few questions.
What is ICD?
Why is it needed to run OpenGL programs?
Why would OpenGL drivers just stop working in WinVista?
This sounds bollocks somehow - a whole class of games will make Vista look like a worse OS than XP. Slowing adoption rate is not a good strategy.
We probably just have to wait for the hardware vendors to provide an OpenGL driver that works with Vista…
And lots of people have in the meantime no way to run our good nice OpenGL games.
Because most users still use Windows it will make OpenGL look bad and not Windows 
=> predjudices will be created => people don’t want to run OpenGL in the future because of that, even if hardware vendors have developed a new OpenGL driver.
:’(
Usual MS anti-competitive behaviour. I used to look forward to os upgrades. Now they’re just a pain.
I don’t know much about DirectX. At what level could a graphics API be written which can be layered over directX or OpenGL? Would it need abstraction at the scenegraph level to allow adequate tailoring and hence performance with each API?
Alan
Edit: Java3D runs with both I think?
Edit: Yep
I’m not too keen on scenegraphs though
Scengraphs have nothing to do with it. The renderer is what needs to be abstracted. You can code up a rendering interface and implementations for both OpenGL and D3D, then use that interface directly in your game, with a scenegraph, or whereever. Take a look at C++ graphics engines like OGRE, Irrlicht, or Dave Eberly’s Wild Magic (which is nicely described in his book ‘3D Game Engine Architecture’) for examples of abstract renderers with OpenGL and D3D implementations.
This is just the last movement of a campaing that M$ states against OpenGL, i was fearing something like this since they bought Silicon Graphics patents…
OpenGL will be out of the industry, despite two of the three main graphics engines are developed for OpenGL (UT2004 and Doom3).
what a pity…
[quote] …two of the three main graphics engines are developed for OpenGL (UT2004 and Doom3).
[/quote]
Even though the UT2004 engine has openGL support, I think it uses the D3D renderer by default.
So that leaves only the Doom3 engine. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if ID would make a D3D renderer for the Doom3 engine as it would be a very sensible thing to do.
Bad, bad news for us developers. Cross platform game development will now be even more difficult. I think the need for a D3D wrapper for java has just become very large now.
That’s true, Unreal engine is Dx :
d’oh!
anyway, this new has just ruined my day :-[
its not neccesarily a bad thing, for one all windows vistas will now support opengl, since it’ll be based on dx, so more compatibility for a larger range of computers, especially for some of those older dx only cards, and second any decent card maker (nvida/ati etc) will all have there own implementation of it in the drivers sinces its industry standard now and they will implement there own opengl directly to get those extra fps, so sounds like a win, win situtation, mostly all new computers have manufacturer drivers and only a handful will use windows default drivers!
It’s win-win if all you are interested in is OpenGL 1.4, without any extensions, and with a performance penalty. The rest of us are screwed.
well it better than no opengl drivers, besides proper opengl will be provided by the video card driver makers
This whole issue appears to be a FUD. M$ cannot afford to damage OpenGL capability.
What they’re saying is that the version of openGL shipped with Vista will be 1.4. This is exactly the state of affairs as with XP, which is stuck at 1.1, except vastly better. The OEM card manufacters will then provide ICDs to give real applications extensions and 2.0 support, as before. To a gamer, there will be no discernable difference. To a professional doing CAD/CAM, there will probably be no discernable difference.
So just rejoice, because we’re getting guaranteed 1.4 HW acceleration.
Cas
Yeah, but from what I understand its the ICD mechanism itself that isn’t going to work under their ‘aeroglass’ scheme. So for all intents and purposes its 1.4 with no extensions. I’ve never really checked out whats officially available in the various different versions of OGL because generally whats important is whatever set of extensions is exported by your driverset & card, I think I’ll head off to opengl.org…
What isn’t immediately apparent is what mechanism is going to be in place to switch from this (overhyped and unneccesary IMO) aeroglass thing to the conventional desktop where the standard way of doing things will apply. Is it automatic ? will there be some sort of API call to switch between the two ? does it happen when you switch into fullscreen mode ? Thats the real kicker. The farfetched worst case scenario is having to reboot into it or something equally laborious. That would really sound the death-knell for OGL games. However I don’t think MS is going to intentially break whole slews of applications so I think it’ll be relatively transparent.
D.
-edit-
Main changes in 1.5 and 2.0 were the addition of buffer objects (VBO’s FBO’s) , pixel shaders & OGSL , occlusion queries, addition of some shadow comparison operators, point sprites, NPT textures, and seperate stencil.
Now there’s some esoteric stuff in there thats more for convenience sakes than anything else, but doing without VBO’s ?? no shading language ? More to the point all these things are more hardware oriented, so you have to ask, why didn’t MS actually settle on 2.0 as the base spec for OGL ? Theres an old saying “never attribute to malice what you can instead attribute to incompetence” but in this case I wouldn’t be too sure. If they’re locking off a standard at a particular revision number and disabling the commonly implemented way of ensuring update compliance then I’d argue that they have the obligation to ensure that they at LEAST do it at the latest revision at that point in time.
I guess only time will tell.
-edit-
Using ICD will deactivate the aeroglass “desktop manager”, so, the mainstream user is going to see something like “I have installed the latests drivers for my video card and the desktop screwed up” -> “the drivers are crap”. States like this going from mouth to ear and being sent to the cards manufacturers will force them to distribute directx-only drivers.
I see a problem there, users stuck at ogl1.4 and not wiling to update, loosing all the improvemenments
[quote] Main changes in 1.5 and 2.0 were the addition of buffer objects (VBO’s FBO’s) , pixel shaders & OGSL , occlusion queries, addition of some shadow comparison operators, point sprites, NPT textures, and seperate stencil.
[/quote]
But ogl is far from dead, with Sony supporting it trough ps3.
This is a gues, and is based on no fact’s
I suspect that ‘windows ccertified’ drivers, like you get from ‘name’ manufactures like ATI and Nvidia will have some new driver architecture that MS has decided to use. What ever the new mechanism is, will allow the new drivers, that include openGL implementations, to co-exist with the aeroglass desktop. They might just be ‘forcing’ drivers to be what ever the new version of WHQL certified.
Time will tell
Endolf
Just some additional info about the topic:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=337097&whichpage=4�
For some first-hand informations look here:
“Windows Graphics Overview [WinHEC 2005; 171 KB]”
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05007_WinHEC05.ppt
“Advances in Display and Composition Architecture for Windows [WinHEC 2005; 422 KB]”
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05005_WinHEC05.ppt