• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

OpenGL 4.0

PermaBanned

PermaBanned

PermaBanned

Soldato
Joined
7 Jul 2009
Posts
16,234
Location
Newcastle/Aberdeen
Well i just came across this:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/11/opengl-4-0-comes-out-to-play/
OpenGL4_610x344.jpg


So OpenGL 4.0 is out, with ATI yet again leading the way and completely leveling the playing field with DX11. And i suppose i don't need to tell you that:

  • OpenGL supports more platforms than DX
  • OpenGL has far more uses than DX
  • OpenGL is better made than DX
  • OpenGL is lighter on resources than DX

etc. etc, on with the fanboy stuff and all. But really, as a Linux user i'm quite exited by this. If only we could convince developers to use it. Rage looks like a great showcase though...


If you want to try it out for yourself:

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/15419/unigine_adds_3d_support_and_opengl_4_0_to_heaven/index.html

3.3 was released too but i doubt you're interested in that ;)
 
oh yes! :D Really need OGL to be a viable competitor to DX, for the sake of linux users everywhere

Is there such a thing as a Directx fanboy? :confused:
 
Problem with OpenGL it "makes every game look like quake".

I like the principle, we dont need directX, openGL would sync with any windows os, would work find on XP, Vista, win7, ubuntu, opensuse, mandriva, OS X.

Why don't developers use it much? They must be paid my M$ or M$ make it very hard for developers not using DirectX.
 
Oxy said:
Problem with OpenGL it "makes every game look like quake".

I like the principle, we dont need directX, openGL would sync with any windows os, would work find on XP, Vista, win7, ubuntu, opensuse, mandriva, OS X.

Why don't developers use it much? They must be paid my M$ or M$ make it very hard for developers not using DirectX.
Click to expand...

I think it's because DirectX is more of a complete package. The only thing you need to worry about a Windows PC not supporting is Direct3D or having a powerful enough GPU. Whereas with OpenGL, you need separate Compute, Sound, Input etc libraries. This will make development more complex. I think that although Doom 3 used OpenGL it still used DirectX for input etc.
 
We have to wonder what percentage of people want to play games on Linux. Not very much I suspect.
 
Broken Hope said:
Er, until recently OpenGL was massively behind DX, its only just about come up to par with DX11 features.
Click to expand...

Nope, OpenGL has always been superior to DirectX/Direct3D. Even 10 years ago, Microsoft were in serious danger of loosing the gaming market entirely so they 'forced' developers (such as Bungie) to use it with a large pile of money hoping that would show what it was capable of. Of course, OpenGL has been capable of so much more but since it's an Open Source project by the Khronos Group they didn't have lots of money to spend on getting developers to use it, and so Microsoft once again creates a stupidly huge monopoly for itself with a somewhat inferior product.

If you're talking about OpenGL 3.2/DX11 then it could support tessellation through add ons and compute shader through OpenCL. Other than that it was still superior.

Has anybody run the Heaven benchmark with OpenGL 4.0 yet? Care to post results and visual commentary?
 
Okay few misconceptions, going to go through them quickly:

OpenGL is a standard, not an implementation, how 'better coded' it is entirely depends on how well the driver developers have implemented it. I mean if I really felt like it I hypothetically could go and make a craptacular OpenGL implementation myself, and I can tell you now that it wouldn't be better coded than the majority of DirectX implementations. :p

DirectX is good for 2D, it has Direct2D, and prior to that it had DirectDraw. I think DirectX's adequacy in this area is amply demonstrated by Mozilla's interest in it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/Direct2DDemo
Unfortunately OpenGL doesn't get a look in for 2D support. You have to use a load of hacks involving projection to get 2D support in OpenGL, and it's a pain in the back side (I've been there). However there are other libraries like SMFL which make use of OpenGL for hardware 2D acceleration (I particularly like SMFL because it allows you to use fragment shaders).

OpenGL certainly was for a long time behind DirectX in terms of features, it didn't get many DirectX 10 features until 3.3 which only came out recently. There were extensions for OpenGL 2 but they don't really count as all too often they only work for one graphics vendor.

OpenGL doesn't make everything look like quake, id Tech x makes everything look like quake, in theory at least OpenGL 4 should be capable of doing most of what DirectX 11 can - consequently, Nexuiz using DarkPlaces, being based on idTech 3, looks an awful lot like Quake 3 with extra shiny added.

I would however like to add that I fully support OpenGL (personally it's my graphics library of choice when messing around, mostly because it's relatively simple to use compared to DirectX in many cases, but also because I like the idea of my tinkerings being cross-platform). I absolutely agree with you in that I think it'd be ultimately better for us gamers if more developers were to adopt the OpenGL standard.
 
Broken Hope said:
http://www.geeks3d.com/20100527/tes...ion-gtx-480-vs-gtx-470-vs-hd-5870-vs-hd-5770/

Yeah OpenGL 4.0 is so superior that it's slower on both ATI and Nvidia cards, especially slow on ATI cards.
Click to expand...

That's because Heaven 2.1 really doesn't like the 10.5 Cats. It's early days yet, and they're quite close but if you have a look down the comments...

Don’t forget NVIDIA paid/bribed/whatever Unigine to add ‘Extreme’ tesselation in Heaven 2.0

They did this when they launched the 480 so they could release benchmarks to show the 480’s “superior” tessellator over the 5870.

Rerun your benchmarks with “Normal” tesselation and see if ATI gets a lot closer to NVIDIA.
Click to expand...

I remember we’ve ran unigine tropics throught gDebugger to see what it does in OpenGL rendering mode. And the results were…… strange. Unigine was doing some very useless work, like binding textures with 0×0 or 1×1 size, switching vertex buffers one after another without rendering, changing render states, also without rendering. But that was one-two years ago. Perhaps now everything works better.
Can anyone check that? gDebugger is available as a free trial for 7 days. It’s just i’m not able to do that right now.
Click to expand...
 
Superewza said:
Well if this thread is anything to go by, quite a lot. If games were made available for Linux as well as Windows then there would no reason for a lot of people to use Windows any more.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18114012
Click to expand...

Perhaps, but this forum isn't a typical of average consumers. ;)

Saying that, I was trying to think of reasons of why I should defend DirectX, but couldn't think of any. My primary interest is the development of graphics technology and quality, and if OpenGL is better than DirectX, I'm all for it.
 
Superewza said:
A little, i went through a book on OpenGL:ES a few years ago but i doubt i can remember much.
Click to expand...
Well I don't think you're in a position to pan DirectX on all fronts with any authority. The open/portable angle is obvious and well known.
 
If all games would be available on another OS I might just switch to Linux or so...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom