5 ms·

The real news appears to an approx 30% speed-up between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. That's pretty impressive!

by codeka 13y ago

jlouis 13y ago
Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX. While DX is good and all that, I would much prefer to see an Open Standard prevail in this space.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX. There are plenty of reasons developers go to DirectX, support and tooling being two of them. On the game consoles, outside Microsoft, regardless what is spread around, game consoles don't support OpenGL, just variations thereof or similar APIs. For example the PS3 has OpenGL ES 1.0 combined with Cg, not GLSL. In the end most developers use Libcgm anyway. As for the other consoles they are also other type of APIs. In the end, the best approach is to have an API agnostic middlelayer and be independent of the underlying API.
  - DougBTX 13y ago
    I'm just starting to use OpenGL, but doesn't OpenGL ES 1.0 use a fixed pipeline? So why would it support GLSL?
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Because PS3 has shaders. Sony decided to support those shaders by an agreement with NVidia to use Cg, instead of adapting GLSL to their tooling. Later on, it was asked at one GDC event if developers cared about GLSL, but since almost everyone that cares about performance on the PS3 uses Libgcm anyway, the update never happened.
- angersock 13y ago
  That's cute and all, but you probably--deep down--don't actually want that open standard to be OpenGL. OGL is a crufty, messy API, and even now support is spotty for the different versions. For a very long time, for example, OGL 2.1 was the only thing supported by Apple, despite numerous extensions to bring it up to feature-parity with modern OGL. Vendor extensions made programming code a mess, and many of the core concepts as embodied in the API are minefields for developers. Don't hate on DX just because it's from Microsoft--an open re-implementation would actually help everyone.
  - ianlevesque 13y ago
    There's been some progress on one already, the d3d1x state tracker from Gallium3d is an implementation of D3D 10/11 directly on top of the GPU drivers on Linux, without using OpenGL as an intermediary.
    - figglesonrails 13y ago
      That driver was shelved a long time ago. :(
  - asveikau 13y ago
    Any time I hear someone complain about cruft OpenGL I think of this JWZ rant: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-to-the-iphone/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t... It's not my area of expertise but it does ring true to me - whenever I see people complain about OpenGL they always seem to be confusing API surface with implementation details. I.e. the "legacy" parts can be shimmed to the "modern" parts without harming anyone very much.
    - figglesonrails 13y ago
      As an avid reader of Mesa3D and a user of GL 3.3 core, I can say that much cruft was removed in so far as it doesn't resemble a modern GPU (e.g. fixed function pipeline), OpenGL still has plenty of warts to bitch about. The GL 3.3 samplers, e.g., are great. It does not require you to bind a sampler object in order to change the properties of it. However, the rest of the GL objects follow bind-change-unbind and a lot of implicit state which makes writing OpenGL libraries that can be reused highly weird because you never know what state some moron left the GL machine in. Now GL 3.3+ is in an interesting position. They've got old functions that operate in a specific bind-change-unbind and new function that operate directly. So not only has the API not yet been fully "modernized", it's in the halfway state and it looks like it won't be pushed in one direction or the other -- just stuck in limbo for something like 3-4 revisions. So I guess what I'm saying is, until the inconsistencies are ironed out, OpenGL still has some cruft that directly affects even the most modern GL 4.x programs.
signed0 13y ago
That is good news. Hopefully this will mean StarCraft 2 runs a bit smoother on my machine since it uses OpenGL.
brymaster 13y ago
Only for that particular GPU he tested: Geforce 660Ti Let's see if there is any noticeable improvement on lesser or older GPUs.

The real news appears to an approx 30% speed-up between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. That's pretty impressive!

by codeka 13y ago

The real news appears to an approx 30% speed-up between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. That's pretty impressive!

Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX. While DX is good and all that, I would much prefer to see an Open Standard prevail in this space.

pjmlp 13y ago
> Indeed. Hopefully it can also, finally, be the stab in the back of DirectX. There are plenty of reasons developers go to DirectX, support and tooling being two of them. On the game consoles, outside Microsoft, regardless what is spread around, game consoles don't support OpenGL, just variations thereof or similar APIs. For example the PS3 has OpenGL ES 1.0 combined with Cg, not GLSL. In the end most developers use Libcgm anyway. As for the other consoles they are also other type of APIs. In the end, the best approach is to have an API agnostic middlelayer and be independent of the underlying API.
- DougBTX 13y ago
  I'm just starting to use OpenGL, but doesn't OpenGL ES 1.0 use a fixed pipeline? So why would it support GLSL?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Because PS3 has shaders. Sony decided to support those shaders by an agreement with NVidia to use Cg, instead of adapting GLSL to their tooling. Later on, it was asked at one GDC event if developers cared about GLSL, but since almost everyone that cares about performance on the PS3 uses Libgcm anyway, the update never happened.
angersock 13y ago
That's cute and all, but you probably--deep down--don't actually want that open standard to be OpenGL. OGL is a crufty, messy API, and even now support is spotty for the different versions. For a very long time, for example, OGL 2.1 was the only thing supported by Apple, despite numerous extensions to bring it up to feature-parity with modern OGL. Vendor extensions made programming code a mess, and many of the core concepts as embodied in the API are minefields for developers. Don't hate on DX just because it's from Microsoft--an open re-implementation would actually help everyone.
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  There's been some progress on one already, the d3d1x state tracker from Gallium3d is an implementation of D3D 10/11 directly on top of the GPU drivers on Linux, without using OpenGL as an intermediary.
  - figglesonrails 13y ago
    That driver was shelved a long time ago. :(
- asveikau 13y ago
  Any time I hear someone complain about cruft OpenGL I think of this JWZ rant: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-to-the-iphone/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t... It's not my area of expertise but it does ring true to me - whenever I see people complain about OpenGL they always seem to be confusing API surface with implementation details. I.e. the "legacy" parts can be shimmed to the "modern" parts without harming anyone very much.
  - figglesonrails 13y ago
    As an avid reader of Mesa3D and a user of GL 3.3 core, I can say that much cruft was removed in so far as it doesn't resemble a modern GPU (e.g. fixed function pipeline), OpenGL still has plenty of warts to bitch about. The GL 3.3 samplers, e.g., are great. It does not require you to bind a sampler object in order to change the properties of it. However, the rest of the GL objects follow bind-change-unbind and a lot of implicit state which makes writing OpenGL libraries that can be reused highly weird because you never know what state some moron left the GL machine in. Now GL 3.3+ is in an interesting position. They've got old functions that operate in a specific bind-change-unbind and new function that operate directly. So not only has the API not yet been fully "modernized", it's in the halfway state and it looks like it won't be pushed in one direction or the other -- just stuck in limbo for something like 3-4 revisions. So I guess what I'm saying is, until the inconsistencies are ironed out, OpenGL still has some cruft that directly affects even the most modern GL 4.x programs.

signed0 13y ago

That is good news. Hopefully this will mean StarCraft 2 runs a bit smoother on my machine since it uses OpenGL.

brymaster 13y ago

Only for that particular GPU he tested: Geforce 660Ti Let's see if there is any noticeable improvement on lesser or older GPUs.