Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch, and support only the latest x86, ARM and MIPS chips. It might be the only way to catch-up with DirectX, no? Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles, and what will bring to the mobile market.

View on HN

> Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch

Yes. Someone should do it. The major industry players seem to have the interest but lack the will to put in the resources it requires.

> Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles

Prepare for disappointment.

If you prepare for disappointment, you're can't really be disappointed, can you?

You can always be more disappointed.

Spoken like a true OpenGL programmer. :(

I work from the proposition that we are all crazy arrogant monkeys whose main talent is the ability to construct and understand stories.

This means I am constantly really impressed by the fact that we get anything done at all.

Unfortunately, I am also a crazy arrogant monkey, so am also constantly really deeply disappointed by the fact that we haven't all got jet-packs and holiday homes on the moon yet.

Well good version of OpenGl 5.0 would be very welcome(even without complete rewrite), but history shows that ARB(Architectural Review Board) likes to shoot itself in foot[1]. Design by committee usually takes a lot of time, so rewrite would probably take forever given number of legacy OpenGL Cad applications.

Small nitpick: OpenGL would be catching up with Direct3d not with DirectX(which includes parts like input or sound that AFAIK are out of scope for OpenGL)

[1]http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-...

edit: found HN discussion about this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711231

Thanks for that! I totally forgot about Fahrenheit and I was super excited about it back then and depressed when it got cancelled, ha!

They tried with OpenGL 3, but then it took them years and the plan were scrapped. ( That is when Microsoft brings DirectX 9 to the table, which is well designed and much more usable then OpenGL ). They restarted development a few years ago to clean up the mess.

The main reason why OpenGL did not get a restart were because of pressures from CAD and 3D Modelling Industry.

The cynical view is that having two standards, one consumer and one pro, lets graphics companies ship the same chips, but charge 10x as much for the pro version with a couple driver tweaks. If the consumer games were written against the pro standard (requiring pro support in the consumer cards), how would they justify the pro line?

Why is that community (CAD/3d-modelling) even sitting at the table?

These modern GPUs are very generalized hardware now. Their drivers are "simulating" all kinds of features. Its a bit like OSS vs ALSA. They should just make the GPU a standard compiler target, and offer only the bare minimum (video-mode-setting) at the driver level.

Let the game industry write/design their own API on top. Let the CAD community do the same for their usecases. I know, with Mesa, this is kind of the setup. Except mesa isnt executed by the gpu: it runs on the CPU, and from there it executes code on the GPU.

Wouldnt it be much nicer if GPUs just behaved like CPUs? They are just optimized for different types of proccesing. Thats the interesting end-game: could the CPU be optional?

GPUs still have a ton of performance-critical fixed function units, and actually recently gained a new category of fixed-function unit (tesselation). OpenCL cannot replace OpenGL or D3D.

And the CAD/DCC market gets a say because they pay 10-100x more per seat than consumers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com