could opengl soon be a thing of the past for windows pc''s? after reading up on DirectX 8, i think even John Carmack will turn to the dark side. they finally combined ddraw and d3d into ''DirectGraphics'', which should have been done a long time ago, and all the great 3d card makers are working with microsoft to supply us with some great new rendering techniques. although OpenGL might finally become truely obsolete on windows machines soon, dx8 and portability are really hard to fit in the same sentence.(i just did it, i got skillz) of course i also read someplace(i think the SGI site) that MS and SGI are supposed to release a better OpenGL for windows systems. so please don''t hate me for this, but what about a possible dx8 section on the nehe site? i know we''re dealing with OpenGL here, but i think dx8 might just make OpenGL totally obsolete for us windows users. Gumpus P. Maximus - currently dazed and confused

Incorrect, there is a new version of D3D which is initialised on its own and DDraw no longer exists. Blt and BltFast functionality will be added to D3D in DX9. It is not called DirectGraphics.


Please state the nature of the debugging emergency.

sharewaregames.20m.com

Well, alot of ppl use GNU/Linux , Unix... (including me), and those will never go over to Windows. There is also alot of Mac users out there. Try to find one Linux kiddie that can tought of moving over to Windows. Its just... unstable Start talking about DX when m$ is porting a version for Linux (that will never happend).
/asm0

Um,

There''s been bit a talk about this on the www.opengl.org forums for quite a while. Most reckon that OpenGL won''t ''die'' - but agree that it does have some problems. (Actually mainly due to Microsoft not shipping a version 1.2 compliant ICD).

The ARB process seems to take too long to ratify new extensions, and because MS haven''t delivered OpenGL1.2 a lot of what should be core functionality is still only accessable through the extension mechanism. (Can you say "Multitexturing"? )

Games are being released on more platforms, Win32, Linux, Mac and OpenGL is the only graphics API that has implementations on these OS''s. An article on IGN.com even stated that the Nintedo GameCube will have OpenGL support - I''m not sure about that though...

The extension ''mess'' is a double edged sword. Without it, OpenGL wouldn''t move forward, with it we have to query for specific types of hardware and customise programs for that hardware. This ''getting down and dirty'' is precisely the opposite of what the OpenGL API was written for; abstraction over hardware. Mumble.

The biggest danger to OpenGL is probably the X-Box. But even that could go either way. NVidia are doing the graphics subsystem so if they write an OpenGL ICD for it we could see some OpenGL games on the X-Box and PC.

DirectX8 looks very nice, the shader APIs (both vertex and pixel) look like a riot to play with. I like the way they''ve cleaned up initialisation too.

So my ''fix'' to stop OpenGL dying:

1. Get 1.2 out NOW!
2. Get the ARB reviewing and approving extensions every 6 months.
3. Get ATI, Matrox, 3DFX and S3 updating their drivers as regularly as NVidia.
4. Keep SGI opensourcing things for the other platforms.
5. Get the above IHVs making fast stable drivers on all platforms.
6. And relax!

Phew! Pretty big post that.

BTW,
''quotation fingers'' copyright Dr. Evil 1969-1999.

What I meant to add, but forgot was; DirectX8 is clean slate and the COM interface means that legacy code will still work with it. OpenGL couldn''t do this. MS have got DX8 right in that they''ve chosen a bunch of functionality they want it to provide and told and IHVs to deal with it. In essence the IHVs have now got a ''checklist'' (there he goes again with the quotation marks) to measure their hardware and drivers against.

OpenGL does the opposite, the IHVs say, "Huh, we can do this in hardware - lets write an extension". So we get patchy support for stuff with OpenGL. There''s no around this, the ARB better get togehter and develop a coherent way of moving forward before it really is too late.

Doom and gloom indeed.

Paul Groves
pauls opengl page