I just finished reading Tom's Hardware's benchmarks comparing Vista and XP. I remember hearing that Microsoft was dropping OpenGL support and Tom's confirms it with their benchmark of OpenGL apps. I don't follow the graphics community as much as I'd like but this really has to be a blow for some of them. If not that, then it's a blow for them upgrading to Vista.
Back on my Digital Content Creation with Eclipse soap box, I guess this kind of spells doom for the OpenGL work that's been going on with Java and, by extension, SWT. I have always thought that it would be very cool to have a 3D modeler built on Eclipse and nicely integrated with the CDT to build games and such. Most of these modelers are built using OpenGL and probably don't work well on Vista.
So the question becomes, when will someone build DirectX support in Java in an SWT window?
It also provides a twist for the work I'm doing on Windows development. I've been torn between whether Windows developers should use the Windows SDK or MinGW with the CDT. I'm not sure how mature the DirectX support is with MinGW compared to their OpenGL support, so my feeling is that the Windows SDK with the DirectX SDK will be what developers will want to use. Which means I better get that Windows SDK integration done...
The link to Tom's hardware isn't working.
ReplyDeleteThat aside, OpenGL is a binding that works on many platforms, not just Windows. There's default OpenGL renderes for a number of different platforms; there's OpenGL support in Mac OS X, for example, and a number of other Linux distributions support it.
As for performance; I'd be interested to know what the performance is really like. Most of the time, it's not about creating games -- who would use an Eclipse base for gaming? -- but perhaps more than enough for rendering 3D graphics.
I personally hope that we don't lose the OpenGL stuff in Eclipse; that's the most portable drawing mechanism there is. Just because a Windows direct API is better doesn't make it a better choice all round.
Hmm, the link worked for me. Anyway, it's Tom's top story right now so you can't miss it.
ReplyDeleteI purposely left out Mac and Linux to make a point. Despite the coolness of Mac and freeness of Linux, Windows still dominates the tools market by a long way. So while, yes, OpenGL will work well on those platforms, it won't work well on Windows Vista, which is huge news.
Also I'm not thinking of Eclipse for gaming, but Eclipse for making games, where you can work on your 3D models and your C++ code all in one environment. Although running games while working on plug-ins has a certain appeal...
Link is dead for me too, and searching the site for "opengl" returns no hits.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to say for sure without being able to read TFA, but I wouldn't get too worried about GL benchmarks at this stage. MS have never really supported OpenGL in a useful way. They used to ship a software implementation of v1.1; I believe Vista will include an accelerated (albeit suboptimal) implementation of v1.4 layered on top of Direct3D.
As ever, decent GL support will be up to IHV driver writers, and I'm not aware of any serious stumbling blocks here except that all those driver writers have been tied up trying to get something functional out of the door for launch. I can well believe that lots of things are broken at the moment, but probably no more than in the rest of Vista.
See here for confirmation of the general landscape, and keep an eye on the OpenGL.org bulletin boards if you're worried.
Tom's hardware uses redirections to various sites if it believes you're in a different country. For me, the tomshardware.com address gets routed through to tomshardware.co.uk, where it can't find the link. So it's quite possible that it can't find the link because it thinks I'm in a different country to you; and when I navigate to the 'home' page, I get nothing on OpenGL/Vista.
ReplyDeleteBear in mind that OpenGL is useful for things outside games, and that it's also fairly unlikely that people will be wanting to model Windows games using OpenGL. But just because it's not going to work out for games developers doesn't mean that it's not useful; 3D charting for business reports (e.g. BIRT) could find OpenGL rendering most useful. And at the end of the day, it comes down to the graphics card and its drivers on Windows, rather than the supplied Microsoft ones.
Hi Doug, I'm a games developer who uses Direct X on a daily basis. In some way we're non too bothered about being able to run Direct X inside SWT as we build all our tools in C/C++ (although we are thinking about using C# in the future).
ReplyDeleteI'm also somewhat a fan of OpenGL and my understanding is that there is nothing stopping the hardware vendors shipping fast GL rendering in Vista, however they're tied up with the new driver model for DX10 at the moment :-D
What I am really keenly following is moving to using eclipse as a development IDE at work. I use eclipse at home for my tinkering projects and really enjoy using it - I find it a better IDE than Visual Studio but at work we're tied to .Net IDE as we use the MS toolchain.
Sometimes we use the Intel compiler - will your work with the MS Platform SDK allow us to choose to use that on Windows too - IIRC it's command line compatible with MS's compiler?
It wouldn't be too much work to get the windows platform building for GCC either, as the PS2 and 3 ports both do.
I'd love to be able to use eclipse and select between an MS, gcc or Intel compiler for the PC build, then go for a PS3 build all from the same workspace. Then I'd just have to integrate the XBox360 tool chain and I'd be ecstatic. If this were possible it would be a pretty good argument for us to look at eclipse studio wide.
Thanks, Jon, this is great feedback. This exactly the type of environment we'd like to create, one where you can use toolchains from various vendors all in the same workspace. I think we still have some work to do to support multiple toolchains in the same project but I'd love to see this work and Eclipse become a no brainer for developers such as yourself.
ReplyDeleteCheck out the article on OpenGL.org regarding Vista support for OpenGL. This should clarify things. I think Tom's Hardware tested with an driver that had not yet been optimized. http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/
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