The State of OpenGL 273
CowboyRobot writes "No longer vapor, but a true 3D-embedded engine, OpenGL is on the move. Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime, and that desire has prompted the intended release of OpenGL 2.0, due in a few months. Khronos is now in charge of further extending OpenGL to cellphones and handheld gaming devices."
Small Cell Screen (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Small Cell Screen (Score:5, Funny)
Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
I want business class reliability, not a the ability to rent subpar games on my cell phone for $5/month.
When I'm on the phone all day because of my work I want it to be there for important calls, not fizzle out after an hour because it's got a 640x480 pixel screen with 24-bit color.
Sun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sun (Score:3, Funny)
- Chris
Re:Damn them (Score:3, Interesting)
again, vote with your wallet.
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
So - *IF* we want 3D then we want OpenGL.
But do we want 3D in cellphones?
The supposed 'killer app' for 3D on cellphones is the idea of using the positioning detecting capability of the phone - along with network access - to provide an annotated 3D map of your present location. Think of the navigation systems in cars - but in 3D - so you can find the elevator you need to get to a particular office in a big unfamiliar building - or find where you left your car in an multistory parking lot.
Games will obviously use the technology too.
I don't know whether this is important to people or not - but if 3D is happening, it should CERTAINLY be in OpenGL - initially a small subset - gradually improving to a full-blown implementation in every phone as the technology catches up.
Personally, I'd be much happier with a last-generation basic phone that had 10x battery life and didn't lose service quite so easily.
Can we get X-ray vision too? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which could be your target as a glowing orb, or a character in of a video game super-imposed on the actual landscape, or the trail your friend took through the same city two years ago, or just some construct representing an interesting thing about your environment, or ...
I think that would be a real killer app.
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
That has got to be the stupidest idea I've ever heard. It's hard enough to get a map that shows STREETS accurately on a GPS, much less elevators inside of buildings in a 3D environment on a cellphone. Besides, how the hell do you navigate? It's hard enough with a mouse and a keyboard, much less with
Re:Damn them (Score:3, Insightful)
As virtually all new phones come with Java built-in, its kind of moronic not to use it.
Of course, if you prefer wasting your time hard-coding OpenGL calls and re-compiling for each make of phone, that is up to you, but as a business model its suicide.
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
Re:Damn them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Damn them (Score:2, Informative)
First, they still sell black and white portable computers today, they've just shrunk; before they were 5-pound portables, now they're quarter-pound Palms.
Second, battery life, both for portable phones and portable computers, has been on the increase, not the decrease. My portable computer from the mid-90s (black and white, even) was lucky to get two hours. My giant, power-sucking G4 with a full-color 3D-accelerated screen is unlucky to get three hours; I can get five hours on light use. My girl
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
You're lucky to get 10 hours on a colour model.
This is a more accurate comparison to colour cell phones, as they are devices of a similar class.
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
How about realizing that there are other users out there? How about realizing that teenagers ( a gigantic market, by any measure ) might WANT their phones to play games?
Be a little more myopic next time, AC...
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
I could understand GPS enabled pagers for teenagers, but what parent would want to let a teenager have a glorified gameboy phone?
Re:Damn them (Score:2, Insightful)
Next time my car breaks down and I have to call for help I'll remember how stupid my parents were for getting me a phone instead of a pager.
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
Re:Damn them (Score:2)
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Eventually cell phones, pdas, computers, entertainment devices (tivo,etc) will converge into one or two devices, one of which will be portable. This is one item on the continuum leading towards the ubiquitous always on computing device.
3) OpenGL on the cell phone is simply a way of saying, "OpenGL on any platform requiring 3d graphics." It's marketting. It may not be used heavily on cell phones, but perhaps new a new HDTV format will allow for an opengl data stream to place products in pretaped shows for different areas (ie, midwest viewers see a CVS pharmacy, while southeast see an Eckard). Having a pared down implementation meant for little processors and low resolution screens is an asset. Don't abuse the implementation if the idea can be generalized.
-Adam
OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although right now OpenGL is all that's out there for low-cost portable embedded 3D software, no one is going to develop with it until hardware support emerges. Who wants a handheld 3D mapping device that takes 10 seconds to redraw a frame using an ARM9 software renderer?
Re:OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:2, Informative)
as it is only a subset of the opengl standard trimmed for low power/low speed devices it is (or will be) also fast in software. afaik there are also hardware renderers for opengl es in the works.
and remember:
we hat 3d games long before the gigahertz pcs with 3d accelerators were out and they were a tiny bit faster than 1 frame/second.
Re:OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:5, Insightful)
After having a look at the spec, OpenGL ES seems -1, Redundant. Why not just aim for full OpenGL, starting with a 'MiniGL/QuakeGL' style implementation, of the sort which really got the ball rolling on the PC.
However, I believe it does include fixed-point maths support - very useful for all the ARM-based devices out there with no FPU.
Re:OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:2, Informative)
I hope so (Score:5, Interesting)
I sincerely hope it happens. I wish developers felt more inclinded to make their 3D engined GL based rather than DX based, so the day where I can play any game in linux may actually arrive. Of course, we have to give massive amounts of respect to those who do make OpenGL platforms for their games (ID, Epic), but what about those who feel DX is easier and more practical for what they do(Valve).
Maybe if we're lucky, the Carmack will drop in to this discussion and tell us exactly what he thinks needs to happen to really make GL a reality for most gamaes again.
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hope so (Score:2)
Re:I hope so (Score:2, Interesting)
I still think the Quake games (especially Quakeworld and Quake 3) were and still are the best deathmatch games, simply because of the almost perfect physics. Jumps just feel right, and not awkward as in Half-Life.
But as you said, the breakable scenery in Duke3D made for some pretty cool matches. I think Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are going to be the beginning of a wave of games with plentiful breakable object, just like in Duke3D. Ma
Re:I hope so (Score:2)
Re:I hope so (Score:2)
Famous misquote from the old Batman show (Score:5, Funny)
OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you for your time,
BBH
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:3, Informative)
Or should I say, when I port it to Mac OS, since that's my job. I wish I had the slightest idea how his engine worked... He has all sorts of complicated code that compiles fine on his x86, but is gcc-unfriendly.
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually the linux source is pretty good about using gcc extensions only when necessary -- i.e., because the standard is lacking, not because they're "dumbfucks".
For instance, gcc's extended "asm" syntax (parameter passing, constraints) is extremely important for the sort of low-level code a kernel needs sometimes [and, no, moving all assembly code into separate files is not an adequate repla
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:2)
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:5, Funny)
.. still bitter about yours ?
Re:OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:2)
2) He has $23,000 set away for starting a game company - the plan is to start a game company and have our first game on the market about the time we graduate college. Unrealistic dream? Maybe.
Also, you don't know my friend. He's not only a genius, but actually sticks to what he's creating until it's done... with the exception of when he learns a new trick that makes his program 10% more efficient... but yeah...
OpenGL 1.5 (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenGL is used in the Torque engine [garagegames.com] alongside Direct3D (D3D on Windows, OpenGL on Mac and Linux). It would be great if OpenGL could eclipse Direct3D, and become the premiere 3D platform once again. Perhaps we will see this with the release of OpenGL 2.0, but for a few years Direct3D has been slowly but surely catching up and then surpassing the aging OpenGL standard.
A lot of our customers demand Linux in their solutions (networked gaming terminals) to avoid the cost of licensing Windows XP Embedded for each machine, and the option so far has been to go the Mesa/OpenGL/SDL route (WineX is still too slow for what we do), which, while it has worked, is technically slightly inferior to our Windows equivalents. Hopefully OpenGL 2.0 will change this.
Re: OpenGL 1.5 (Score:2)
> OpenGL is used in the Torque engine alongside Direct3D (D3D on Windows, OpenGL on Mac and Linux).
How well do Torque-based games run on Linux?
Re: OpenGL 1.5 (Score:2, Informative)
About Tribes 2, its Linux port wasn't very good and it choked from time to time for no real reason and Torque engine doesn't have this problem. The real history of Torque is
Re: OpenGL 1.5 (Score:2)
If you check out http://www.garagegames.com you will see that almost all of the Torque-based software products have native Linux and Mac versions.
Try ThinkTanks. It's a pretty cool example.
my interest fwiw (Score:4, Informative)
these simulations are done on beowulf clusters (imagine that!) so I think opengl is the best (the only other API I know of being directx)
Re:my interest fwiw (Score:2)
there is a windows installer if you are running that and don't want to be hassled with compilations, or you can download the source from cvs to compile either on your linux or windows machine
Re:my interest fwiw (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, since you use IDL on a Beowulf I'm assuming they finally added multithreading. That's good, when I used it before my PhD (I'm doing condensed matter physics now, but used IDL at my research job prior to this) there was no multi
OpenGL 2 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OpenGL 2 (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, have you actually programmed for ATi's GLSL implementation lately? It's improved a lot over the last few months, and it's very usable at this point. I can't give details due to an NDA, but expect ATi's implementation to be at 1.0 very soon.
On a related note.. (Score:5, Informative)
Jul 09th 2002: Microsoft Claims IP Rights on Portions of OpenGL [slashdot.org]
Jul 11th 2002: 3D graphics world shaken by patent claims [zdnet.co.uk]
Jul 13th 2002: Microsoft patent claims may affect OpenGL [macworld.com]
Mar 3rd 2003: Microsoft quits OpenGL board [theregister.co.uk]
Wait for the OpenGL hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
Java on top of OpenGL is happening... (Score:5, Interesting)
He said they're realizing 4X speed increases on plain old 2D apps.
They're also working on making 3D game demos (some with 3rd parties) to demo that Java can actually now compete in the desktop game market...
Re:Java on top of OpenGL is happening... (Score:2)
Re:Java on top of OpenGL is happening... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Java on top of OpenGL is happening... (Score:3, Interesting)
gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:5, Informative)
The notion that Pixar would use OpenGL for final rendering if only it were fast enough comes up every time a new video card or GL enhancement comes along just indicates how little people understand how Pixar actually makes their films. Oddly, Pixar really doesn't make this information much of a secret, and they'll even sell you the same software they use.
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:5, Informative)
Presentation [ibiblio.org]
ASHLI [ati.com]
GPGPU [gpgpu.org]
More than Moore's Law [geek.com]
Moore's law : still for wimps [extremetech.com]
Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.
OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.
Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?
Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?
And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?
Do you even remember PixelFlow [unc.edu] from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember seeing an image of that in an old computer graphics "coffee table"-type book back in high school - and you mentioning that popped it in my head...
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:3, Informative)
Technically, no. Renderman (the Pixar renderer) does not perform ray tracing. It uses a scanline renderer that is much faster than any ray tracer I've ever seen. They've been at this for literally decades, and are very good at it. Still, the most complex images in their movies can take many hours -- sometimes more than a day -- to render. The time-to-render doesn't seem to improve much from picture to picture because as computers get
Ahem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since when has OpenGL been vapor?
Re:Ahem... (Score:2)
In the article they kind of say what they mean, but the headline in the Slashdot article makes it seem like OpenGL is FINALLY being released and is no longer vapor.
Me got cornfused....
To my understanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, direct3d is integrated into the direct api which handles a multitude of things, multimedia and game input devices among others, that game developers are almost naturally drawn to by the appeal that so much work has already been done for them
OpenGL can't and really shouldn't have to address all these requirements, but it's just part of why there's been this ongoing struggle. SDL is a reasonable answer to portability while still accomplishing the integration that MS has achieved, but SDL isn't really as mainstream as OpenGL is.
I've seen soap opera plots that were less convoluted than this mess.
Re:To my understanding... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:To my understanding... (Score:2)
given that soap opera plots are targeted at lobotomized cows barely aware enough to sign their name on a credit card application, that's not saying much...
Re:To my understanding... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:To my understanding... (Score:2)
Re:To my understanding... (Score:3, Informative)
SDL and OpenGL are not mutually exclusive. I have very successfully used SDL to handle joystick input, window creation, and sound output, with OpenGL for 3D. SDL in fact is designed to work this way, since SDL will create OpenGL rendering contexts for you when you create windows, and it handles the fullscreen video modes far easier than any other
Re:To my understanding... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Loki hired the guy who developed SDL.
OpenGL | ES is not OpenGL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OpenGL | ES is not OpenGL (Score:2)
OpenGL|ES is ****NOT**** OpenGL.
OpenGL|ES is a * very stripped down* OpenGL for mobile and embeded applications, with a few additions for fixed point support. It in no way shape or form represents OpenGL 2.0 or any itteration of mainstream OpenGL which is still going strong.
It's long been understood that most of the 2.0 functionality was in 1.5 or earlier and the need for 2.0 has gone away except to deprecate older stuff, and many people don't want that to happen.
So yes Ope
Cell Phones? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cell Phones? (Score:2)
I need one with a better battery life though. Triband would be nice, but is not a must.
Simple and functional.
Direct-compile model looks dangerous (Score:2, Interesting)
Given the current less than good state of open source drivers for graphics chips this may well mean that most of the useful (i.e. works with your hardware) compilers may only be available in the Linux world as part of tainted binary drivers. It seems pretty likely that vendors who believe that their current drivers contain deep secrets than open source would
Re:Direct-compile model looks dangerous (Score:3, Informative)
Drivers are closed source now. Drivers will continue to be closed source in the future in spite of where the compiler lies. Having the compiler in the driver is the right decision.
Don't like it. 3DLabs released the front end to their compiler. There is work being done in Mesa to support GLSL.
From now on, all bitching about open versus closed driver
Real time films? Not any time soon. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's more than graphics... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Over the next year or two, I think you're going to see a whole range of applications that use your graphics board as a supercomputer," Trevett says enthusiastically.
was the most interesting part of the article?
SETI@home [berkeley.edu], Finite Element Analysis [hks.com], video recoding [exit1.org] are all areas which could benefit from vector processing , matrix calculation and/or huge register sizes provided by GPUs.
Re:Pixlet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pixlet (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope. He's just another tech wiseass who prizes seeming smart over being accurate.
Re:Pixlet (Score:2)
salesman: well we have this used bike here...
Exactly.
Re:Pixlet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pixlet (Score:2, Informative)
You may want to look up the definition of "rendering" ("The process of creating an image (on the screen or some other medium) of a model".
Pixlet has nothing to do with rendering except as a working format for the already rendered images. The article is talking about OpenGL, a 3D API, which is suitable for rendering, not about what happens with the rendered pictures (which could be compression [google.com] with pixlet).
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about availability, OpenGL is cross-platform (works on OS X, Linux, Windows, etc.) while DirectX is Windows only. OpenGL is also included with many if not all graphic cards. So it's just as widely available, if not more, than DirectX.
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:2)
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:2)
By the time you figure in that most games come out on the PC and most games use only directx, DirectX does come out on top. It's an unfortunate fact that the PC gaming induxstry can completely ignore non-wintel platforms entirely and still be successful.
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:4, Funny)
So you acknowledge that they should be broken up into multiple companies? Groovy!
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:2, Funny)
It's not "OpenGL is Dead"
Teh corretc way:
"Netcraft confirms: OpenGL is Dying"
then you put something like "suXXors!!!111" on the end of it.
sheesh.
Thank you so much! (Score:3, Insightful)
Innovative? They didn't do jack with 3D until OpenGL came along and showed them how. They had to buy it from SGI. This has been documented.
Resilient? Dictionary.com defines this as "Marked by the ability to recover readily, as from misfortune." This is actually true, as they were behind, and had to play catch-up. 10 years later, they have caught up with (and arguably surpassed) a techn
Re:OpenGL is Dead (Score:2)
Resilient? Maybe. Then again, the world of PC practically revolves around Microsoft, so they don't really have much change to deal with.
Re:Carmack (of ID software) (Score:2, Offtopic)
There is no relationship between the release of graphics libararies and the requirement to purchase video cards.
~D
Re:Carmack (of ID software) (Score:2)
New releases of OpenGL also require new video cards. If you want to play a game that requires OpenGL 1.4
Re:Carmack (of ID software) (Score:2)
That's technically true, but useless information. There IS a strong relationship between the release of graphics libraries THAT YOU'D ACTUALLY LIKE TO USE - and the requirement to purchase video cards that are capable of running them.
You aren't going to be able to run GLSL (a crucial part of OpenGL 2.0) at anything like realtime rates without a graphics card that's less than a year old.
It
Re:article text (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what?
You don't get much higher-level than a scenegraph API like Java3D.
I think the author may have been confused, although he did get the overall point right. OpenGL ES on J2ME will probably be the way this goes.
Re:article text (Score:2)
Re:ABOUT DAMN TIME! (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't say something like programmable graphics? OpenGL introduced fragment programs to take advantage of PS2.0 hardware (Radeon 9500+, GeForceFX+) before MS released DirectX 9.
Just because OpenGL started with a great base and has evolved up to version 1.5 doesn't mean it is worse than another API which is at version 9...
Troll?
Re:ABOUT DAMN TIME! (Score:4, Insightful)
2) OpenGL has numerous releases in the last few years. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 were all released in quick succession. What rock have you been hiding under?