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Comment by vrodic | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "OpenGL - The good parts" actually called OpenGL 2.0 ES?

> Isn't "OpenGL - The good parts" actually called OpenGL 2.0 ES?

No, it is called the GL 4.2 core profile. GL 4+ core profile is a superset of GLES2. It does not include any of the stuff left behind from GL 1.x days.

GLES2, and Big-GL3+ have the legacy graphics features removed but the API is still horrible. More on this in my other comments in this thread.

OpenGL 2.0 ES is absolutely horrible - it's 3 generations behind on hardware capabilities even in mobile devices, for eg. even tough almost all chips on mobile support multiple render targets (MRT) I haven't seen a way to do this in ES with any extension yet, even in WebGL. MRT is some pretty basic SM3 (Direct3D 9) level stuff and is required for a lot of cool rendering techniques.

I don't think jwz (who is much smarter than me) has many good things to say about OpenGL ES

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...

JWZ isn't saying that OpenGL ES isn't the good part of OpenGL, he's saying that nobody should ever have removed things from OpenGL in the first place, because he wants to port ancient code to modern systems.

Another way to take it is that ES removes too much from OpenGL.

In any case, I submit to the opinion of experts - my experiments with OpenGL have been simple and, when I attempted anything more complicated, they resulted in much more frustration than learning.

"because he wants to port xscreensaver code to iOS."

fixed that for you.

"jwz" and "Get off my lawn" are practically synonymous at this point. He's a great hacker, and a fantastic writer, but his priorities are entirely different from most developers.

That's what I was thinking - it's a pretty clean subset, but since it's designed for mobile it is probably missing too many of the more advanced features desktop games tend to use. Perhaps one day OpenGL ES could supersede the desktop OpenGL...?

I'm not sure how that would happen, since by definition mobile chips and OpenGL ES need to be "leaner" and maximize efficiency, to preserve battery life, while on the PC you don't care as much about so the chips are more "bloated", and contain a lot more features, since battery life is not much of a concern. Although we may see a return to efficiency, now that laptops are overtaking PC's, but they still need to get rid of the legacy stuff first.

I think what you meant is that OpenGL ES may one day be more popular and more used than the "full OpenGL", because there are a lot more mobile devices + WebGL.

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