DirectX stunning graphics video and the future of Open GL?

[BFG]

blew me away when i watched this for the first time... apparently this is what DirectX 10 is offering...

http://gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2363

Watch both vids, and don't forget to breath!!

[Civrock]

Nobody would've played it if GhR would've been like that... simply because of the online authentication and WAY too high system requirements it would've certainly had.

[BFG]

yes yes yes but look at that environment! Look at the bushes man just look at the bushes!!

hmmm lovely leaves, trickling streams, little wood huts, distant bird song, and camo'ed up mofos creeping about!


by the way this is kinda inportant - it seems Micro$oft has nasty plans for Open GL and there is a pretty nasty attempt to try and kill it off - read here . Its basically down to the implementation of OpenGL in Windows Vista being layered over DirectX - and some down and dirty technical mumbo jumbo. But if people don't complain and make a noise it looks like the up and coming power of Open GL 2  could be really stifled.


ps. i'll move this to tech talk soon

[BFG]

by the god damn way... Apple why the heck are we still on OpenGL Version 1.4.7 ?? Tis not good enough

[Civrock]

That's ooooooooold news. But looking at the performance of games on Intel-Macs, in the new Universal Binary versions, it's MUUUCH better. Just wait for Intel-Towers, even better graphic cards... and 10.5 Leopard.

[BFG]

Not totally old... ok the issue came up last year but its still an issue, and its still not resolved.

this summed it up for me pretty well:

I find M$'s interests questionable when they forsake open standards like OpenGL.
Direct3D isn't a better API provided by M$ for our benefit, it's soley for their benefit.
Anyone who thinks that M$ won't leverage Direct3D to make more money is deluding themselves.

There's no good reason why Windows Vista can't support OpenGL ICDs.
Mac OS X has a composite desktop that implements OpenGL just fine.

For those who like Direct3D, keep using it.
The rest of us demand that OpenGL is intergrated to the same extent as Direct3D in Windows.
M$ is trying to use the ignorance of new users to drive developers toward Direct3D.
New users don't want to hear that their new, fancy OS has to look like last year's OS because the game/software developers are using OpenGL.
And you can bet that's how M$ will explain it, "It's the developer's fault for choosing OpenGL, not ours for refusing to support OpenGL in Windows."

When you refered to the Intel boxes do you mean that you think Microsoft will port DirectX for the mac? I doubt it. But what they are doing is Killing OpenGL. Now that would f*ck us up good and proper.

IF Leopard brought us OpenGL 2.0 then that would be great - but if developers are pushed into using DirectX and not OpenGL that isn't going to help us a great deal!


Another good sum up:

Any software company wants as huge a target audience as possible, so for them it's much better to write OpenGL-based apps instead of apps based on Direct3D. The reason? Why settle for 90% of the market when you can reach 99% of the market for basicly the same development costs? Especially if it looks like the 90% market share will shrink, and if you look around at Linux development and deployment in the world, it looks like it will indeed shrink.

And that's why it makes business sense for Windows Vista to not fully support OpenGL. It's also the same reason why it will be a cold day in hell before DirectX comes to Linux and/or OSX. I believe, however, that this tactic won't save them in the long run.

[[:] Mr. T]

Mmmmm... "interactive destructible environments".

Now THAT'S cool.

[:MoD:Shade]

This is very sexy - but I would imagine system requirements being quite demanding.

I might get lost in the forest. . .

[Cobra]

by the god damn way... Apple why the heck are we still on OpenGL Version 1.4.7 ?? Tis not good enough

Where did you get 1.4.7?  OpenGL Driver Monitor confirms that it's version 1.5.  It has been so since before Tiger was released.  Also, the big features of the 2.0 spec (like the OpenGL Shading Language, framebuffer objects) are already available on OS X.  Only a couple features remain before full 2.0 compliance can be claimed.

And there seems to be some huge confusion about OpenGL support on Windows Vista...
On Windows XP (today's Windows), the default OpenGL implementation provided by Microsoft is a software renderer implementing OpenGL 1.2.  No one (for the most part) ever used this, because it's too slow.  On Windows Vista, the default implementation of OpenGL is a wrapper around DirectX that provides version OpenGL 1.4.

This is an improvement over what XP offers — a massive one.  OpenGL calls are acting as a shim layer to DirectX calls, yes...but it's running on graphics hardware, so it's going to be orders of magnitude faster than the software renderer provided for XP today.

On top of that, you don't seem to realize that independent hardware vendors like NVIDIA and ATI will still be able to provide their own drivers.  Same as XP.  They are free to implement any version of the API and any extensions that they want with their ICDs.  Same as XP.  They will be just as fast as they are today.

There are still implications for developers and users of OpenGL applications, but they aren't as bad as it sounds like you think it is.  For games, the issue is completely irrelevant.  Games are generally fullscreen applications that do not use the Aeroglass compositor, so they are completely unaffected by any of this.  However, using drivers from NVIDIA or ATI (which most people are going to be doing) will cause the Aeroglass compositor to be disabled for windows that use OpenGL.  This means that if the window had a border that should be transparent, it will appear opaque (since the compositor isn't handling that window).

This is a bad thing, but it's hardly an "OpenGL killer zOMG!!1!"  We'll see if Microsoft finds a solution to the problem (or if it even cares) or if the default renderer's performance for such applications is good enough for developers and users.

Hmm, sorry about the length.  Just wanted to clear some stuff up.  Hope you made it to the end 


Edit:  Oh, and that video's very sweet.  Love the "Fully Interactive Environments" bit, where the leaves of that plant actually react to collision, unlike most static plants of today's games.