[Bf-committers] OpenGl in windowsVista ... bad news....

Ton Roosendaal ton at blender.org
Sun Aug 7 12:35:20 CEST 2005


Hi,

I'm concerned about OpenGL as well. After the Siggraph visit a couple  
of trends really were clearly visible;

- the (large) ATI and NVidia booths didn't display *anything*  
mentioning OpenGL. Not the OpenGL logo, not the text "OpenGL" anywhere  
(apart from in brochures). They're both heavily promoting their own  
developer tools and APIs now.

- Linux & OSX workstations seem to become a standard for 3D artists.  
Talking with the larger studios (ILM, DigitalDomain, Dreamworks)  
confirmed that. MS seems to aim more for the mass-market media & game  
consumers.

On the other hand... if MS adds OpenGL as an emulation layer, and it  
still delivers 50% of the speed, that's really not that bad. For many  
years Linux was slower in gfx too, the roles just switch. If you're  
serious about your 3d work, you just know what OS to install then. :)
Nevertheless, the trend seems to be that OpenGL support narrrows down  
to 3D tools and for scientific usage. In the future you'll see fewer  
consumer 3d cards supporting OpenGL (like S3 already does).

I've had a long talk with one of the Nvidia marketing guys, and he  
confirmed Nvidia would be very interested to see GLSL (or rather their  
own Cg) being integrated within a tool itself. None of the 3D tools out  
there really supports this integration (only as "option", in a clumsy  
separate window or so).
It wouldn't be too hard to mimic the basic Blender lighting, material  
and texture options with GLSL, enhancing and speeding up the 'shaded  
display' mode quite some. Here an interesting market opportunity for  
Blender arises... with Nvidia (or ATI) willing to give support as well.  
Are there devs out here with OpenGL 2.0 experience willing to check on  
it? The coding work would involve writing a sortof wrapper though, to  
enable in Blender to set an "OpenGL Profile" to denote which level of  
HW support you have.

-Ton-



On 7 Aug, 2005, at 5:07, Campbell Barton wrote:

> I realy doubt this will happen,  without some kind of workaround.
> There are heaps of OpenGL apps out there, Either MS Will have an  
> option to run OpenGL in a faster mode, ATI/NVidia might fix it with  
> there drivers, or even modify there hardware so its not 50% as fast.
> If they to to OpenGL what they did to Java by releasing a crappy  
> version. then people in the 3d industry (not a huge proportion of  
> windows users) will pospone upgrading to Vista, and look to  
> alternitives.
> I realy doubt they will shoot themselves in the foot like this. It may  
> even be some rubbish to make people use DirectX over OpenGL.
>
> - 2cents
>
>
>
>>
>> That's typical M$, hope there are enough other people from the  
>> indutry fighting against this f...ing plan.
>>
>>
>> Frédéric van der Essen schrieb:
>>
>>> Quote from www.opengl.org :
>>>
>>> Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer  
>>> OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited  
>>> desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. If an OpenGL ICD is run  
>>> - the desktop compositor will switch off - significantly degrading  
>>> the user experience. In practice this means for OpenGL under  
>>> Aeroglass:
>>>
>>> * OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much  
>>> as 50%
>>> * OpenGL on Windows will be fixed at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4
>>> * No extensions will be possible to expose future hardware  
>>> innovations
>>>
>>> It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD  
>>> within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the  
>>> stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL  
>>> over Direct3D is a policy decision more than a technical decision.
>>>
>>> : (
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>> Bf-committers at projects.blender.org
>>> http://projects.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --  
> Campbell J Barton
>
> 133 Hope Street
> Geelong West, Victoria 3218 Australia
>
> URL:    http://www.metavr.com
> e-mail: cbarton at metavr.com
> phone: AU (03) 5229 0241
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org



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