Nvidia says it's first to offer full OpenGL 3.0 support

Rroff · 17 Dec 2008 at 15:01

thegoonden said:
I don't think OGL is NV proprietry....the clue would be in the name OPENgl.

Is that to me? I was talking about the geometry shader extensions for open GL 3.0 which are vendor specific - most of them maintained by nVidia (some are generic ext others ext_nv).

If your gonna be snide atleast know what your talking about.

CaptainRAVE · 17 Dec 2008 at 15:15

Who cares, what even uses open GL these days? If we really needed it ATI would deliver. I for one dont care.

Rroff · 17 Dec 2008 at 15:17

quite a few games still use open GL and it looks like theres a small handful coming out in the future using open GL 3.0 to support features on XP that would otherwise need DX10+ and vista.

Cyber-Mav · 17 Dec 2008 at 15:39

Lightnix said:
OpenGL 3 still doesn't support geometry shaders. :\

OpenGL 2.1 extensions:

ARB_geometry_shader4

:confused:

Rroff · 17 Dec 2008 at 15:53

There is no ATI support of GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 for OGL3.0 tho which is (currently) maintained by nVidia. There is no ARB equivalent for 3.0 so ATI refuse to support it.

londonbairn · 17 Dec 2008 at 19:24

Rroff said:
There is no ATI support of GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 for OGL3.0 tho which is (currently) maintained by nVidia. There is no ARB equivalent for 3.0 so ATI refuse to support it.

Oh no, let's all ditch our GPUs.

Nvidia doesn't support DX10.1, you should ditch your NV card.... :rolleyes:

Rroff · 17 Dec 2008 at 19:57

ATI needs DX10.1 more than nVidia does (for performance reasons) - theres some extra stuff for deffered shaders specially when throwing AA into the mix. But at the end of the day its of little benefit to nVidia to include it and by denying ATI it they cost them performance.

londonbairn · 17 Dec 2008 at 21:03

Rroff said:
ATI needs DX10.1 more than nVidia does (for performance reasons) - theres some extra stuff for deffered shaders specially when throwing AA into the mix. But at the end of the day its of little benefit to nVidia to include it and by denying ATI it they cost them performance.

DX10.1 is probably more significant than OpenGL 3.0...but they're both pointless, OpenGl more. You need to step back a little and look at the bigger picture, you seem to think that ATi are in desperation or something. No one cares about hypothetical features.

Rroff · 17 Dec 2008 at 21:26

Since when have I said ATI are in desperation? your talking my words way too literally and I hate it when people do that.

Open GL 3.0 is fairly significant (compared to DX10.1) because it brings you hardware features to windows XP and linux, etc. that aren't available in direct3D unless you use D3D10 and vista... theres also several games coming out that are likely to make use of it... JC had this to say on Rage:

"The PC version is still OpenGL, but it is possible that could change before release. The actual API code is not very large, and the vertex / fragment code can be easily translated between cg/hlsl/glsl as necessary. I am going to at least consider OpenGL 3.0 as a target, if Nvidia, ATI, and Intel all have decent support. There really won't be any performance difference between GL 2.0 / GL 3.0 / D3D, so the api decision will be based on secondary factors, of which inertia is one"

I'm sorry but ATI have a history of pushing flashy features that then die off like 3dc, etc. whereas nVidia more typically have a habit of working with game developers to get the useful features into their drivers/games. That is the bigger picture and ATI have done more to hold back progress in graphic technology by barking up the wrong tree than anyone else by a mile.

Mojo · 18 Dec 2008 at 00:42

If openGL were that important, ATI would have ensured they'd have kept competitive by implementing it. Look at DX10. Despite it's overall crapulence both companies designed cards that could (to some degree) take advantage of it, simply due to the fact that it would at some point be used in virtually all new games. Nvidia adopting openGL seems almost like their buyout of Physx. An addition to the market blurb, but entirely optional and, due to that, of less importance than major updates, for example, DX11 (ignoring DX10.1, as it falls into the same market blurb niche as Physx and OpenGL as it is entirely optional).

londonbairn · 18 Dec 2008 at 07:46

Rroff said:
That is the bigger picture and ATI have done more to hold back progress in graphic technology by barking up the wrong tree than anyone else by a mile.

Quote of the year?

Have you lived in a tree? It was ATi who bounced back and hit NV hard with lower price points, that is 1000x more important to a consumer than a dying technology (in terms of gaming for OpenGL) or a technology well in its infancy utilised by all singing and all dancing tech demoes. This "innovation" is nothing short of marketing blurb, I just saw a mailshot from Nvidia and you can see how people fall for it all.

This is not the 1990s, DirectX has been the way forward for gaming for sometime.

Rroff · 18 Dec 2008 at 16:15

rafster said:
Quote of the year?

Have you lived in a tree? It was ATi who bounced back and hit NV hard with lower price points, that is 1000x more important to a consumer than a dying technology (in terms of gaming for OpenGL) or a technology well in its infancy utilised by all singing and all dancing tech demoes. This "innovation" is nothing short of marketing blurb, I just saw a mailshot from Nvidia and you can see how people fall for it all.

This is not the 1990s, DirectX has been the way forward for gaming for sometime.

You appear to know next to nothing about game development... which was the point of what I was saying...

londonbairn · 18 Dec 2008 at 16:24

Rroff said:
You appear to know next to nothing about game development... which was the point of what I was saying...

I don't care about game development and neither do the mass majority of consumers.

However the fact is OpenGL in terms of gaming is near extinct regardless of how great it is theoritically. I don't care if OpenGL can do SKJASK_SDISDJ shaders because no game uses it. I don't care if PhysX can show me a tech demo with flags and particles because no major game needs it. I don't care about CUDA or Stream because a tiny amount of people run apps that use them.

Like I said, take a step back and look around

Rroff · 18 Dec 2008 at 16:27

rafster said:
I don't care about game development and neither do the mass majority of consumers.

However the fact is OpenGL in terms of gaming is near extinct regardless of how great it is theoritically. I don't care if OpenGL can do SKJASK_SDISDJ shaders because no game uses it. I don't care if PhysX can show me a tech demo with flags and particles because no major game needs it. I don't care about CUDA or Stream because a tiny amount of people run apps that use them.

Like I said, take a step back and look around

now that is a quote of the year :| if game development just stagnated we wouldn't have many interesting games...

As I can see things from both a consumer and game developer point of view I think I'm enough of a step back to see a fairly big picture... if you think no major game needs hardware accelerated physics you really really don't know what your talking about...

londonbairn · 18 Dec 2008 at 18:04

Rroff said:
now that is a quote of the year :| if game development just stagnated we wouldn't have many interesting games...

As I can see things from both a consumer and game developer point of view I think I'm enough of a step back to see a fairly big picture... if you think no major game needs hardware accelerated physics you really really don't know what your talking about...

Game development hasn't stagnated, OpenGL has... :confused:

No game does HW physics currently, apart from what, UT3? Mirror's Edge? They're massive games :rolleyes:

You're basing on what might be in the future, you're constantly neglecting the fact that A) OpenGL as great or amazing it is in theory is more or less a dodo in the world of gaming B) PhysX, hardware physics etc is in theory sounds great but in reality is not being utilised and at the moment it's just about hedging on whcih tech is going to be the industry standard.

By the time any physics becomes standard, we'll be on a different generation of GPUs.

Rroff · 18 Dec 2008 at 18:32

nice reading comprehension :S

Keyser Soze · 18 Dec 2008 at 21:32

Don't know how relevant this is,

link for Open GL 3.0 Drivers and info,

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html

my apologies if it has already been posted.

james.miller · 18 Dec 2008 at 21:51

Rroff all you ever seem to do is try to convince everybody how backwards and inefficiant ATi hardware is. oooooh the superscaler arch. is trash.......

is it? they have cards that are just as fast, just as efficiant, just as cool-running and just as cheap (at the VERY least) as nvidia, so what exactly isnt efficiant about it all? They make a great deal more profit on their gpu'd as well, it seems...

Thinking about it, ive not seen you say anything positive about ATi. I'm not really sure who you're trying to kid with that comment on ATi holding back the market - nvidia are notorious for doing just that.

Yamahahahahaha · 18 Dec 2008 at 21:52

OGL offers little extra compared to DX10.

The OGL consortium know they took far too long to get this standard out, and as a result it's behind the curve.

Plus M$ can just give developers large wads of cash to stay with DX10.

Rroff · 18 Dec 2008 at 21:52

confusingly it lists ARB_geometry_shader4 under OGL 3.0 - I was always of the impression this was written against 2.