OpenGL 3 specification delayed

Wednesday 31st October 2007, 07:07:00 PM, written by Tim

After two months of speculation, the OpenGL ARB has finally announced an official delay in the release of the OpenGL 3 specification due to some last-minute changes. There are a few details of how the specification has changed since SIGGRAPH 2007; however, a revised release date has not yet been released.

OpenGL 3 is a total overhaul of the OpenGL core, shedding the state machine roots of previous versions of OpenGL. It was expected to be released by the end of August.

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opengl ± longspeak, khronos, arb


Latest Thread Comments (18 total)
Posted by Killer-Kris on Saturday, 03-Nov-07 02:25:28 UTC
Quoting Simon F
From the linked forum:

Wouldn't this imply mandatory licensing payments to S3?
Quoting codelogic
Mesa :)

So that would affect the implementation of the software renderer, but not the API right?

I'm a windows guy myself, does the Mesa software renderer see much use these days?

Posted by codelogic on Saturday, 03-Nov-07 02:48:47 UTC
Quoting Killer-Kris
I'm a windows guy myself, does the Mesa software renderer see much use these days?
Mesa is the open source OpenGL implementation. It's not purely a software implementation, although it can be compiled to so. Depending on the hardware, and availability of drivers, it supports hardware acceleration (eg intel chipsets, older radeon GPUs (

Posted by Killer-Kris on Saturday, 03-Nov-07 04:00:30 UTC
[QUOTE=codelogic;1086358]Mesa is the open source OpenGL implementation. It's not purely a software implementation, although it can be compiled to so. *Depending on the hardware, and availability of drivers, it supports hardware acceleration *(eg intel chipsets, older radeon GPUs (

Posted by Simon F on Saturday, 03-Nov-07 07:45:02 UTC
Quoting Killer-Kris
That might be a barrier to entry for a new player, but who doesn't already have that license?
I should imagine many of those, say, in the OpenGL ES world might not, and what is in OpenGL often moves into 'ES. Several have their own compression schemes. There's an old (For example, it doesn't mention Ericsson's ETC2) summary here (http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?p=1953&sid=67c2e970242bb2f2ca4b0d6570b3c218). .

Posted by mczak on Saturday, 03-Nov-07 16:53:53 UTC
Quoting Killer-Kris
But if it is predominantly the hardware acceleration that is used it quickly becomes something of a non-issue.
Not really. To support s3tc in a OGL-conformant way, you also need to support online compression of textures. (As far as I know, this is different for OGL ES texture compression with the ETC format. Online texture compression need not be supported, only decompression.)
Currently it works like this: hw drivers based on mesa which support s3tc do not announce support for it (that is, EXT_texture_compression_s3tc), unless you either install a not really official external library (which contains the software compression/decompression code), OR you force the driver to just say it's supported - this will make precompressed textures work (*) (like in most newer games, ut2k4 for instance), but of course will fail badly if an app requests online compression (such as quake3).

(*) Unless you'd hit some fallback case, dropping you to software rasterization

Posted by Sc4freak on Sunday, 04-Nov-07 00:39:30 UTC
Quoting zed
>>People still use openGL?well currently they outnumber the d3d10 users by at least (conservative estimate) 10:1 :) lowblowall together now, d3d10 is DOA :)d3d11 OTOH i do believe will have a high uptake
It depends on what you're using to compare. Comparing all of OpenGL to just Direct3D10 is a little unfair, it'd be more fair to compare the number of OpenGL3 users to Direct3D10 users. Of which Direct3D10 has an infinity to one ratio advantage. Besides, in the world of gaming, DirectX appears to be a far more common choice for developers over OpenGL. There are few big-budget games nowadays that use OpenGL exclusively.

Posted by codelogic on Sunday, 04-Nov-07 05:23:20 UTC
Quote
Besides, in the world of gaming, DirectX appears to be a far more common choice for developers over OpenGL. There are few big-budget games nowadays that use OpenGL exclusively.
If your target is the PC / Xbox (360?) , then DX is probably your API of choice. The PS3 uses OpenGL-ES and most other consoles (PS2/Wii/etc) have their own API (some of them OpenGL-like, I think), so I'm not sure if DX would the far more common choice.

Posted by K.I.L.E.R on Sunday, 04-Nov-07 05:23:48 UTC
Don't forget hobbyists like me.

Posted by Demirug on Sunday, 04-Nov-07 13:38:22 UTC
Quoting codelogic
If your target is the PC / Xbox (360?) , then DX is probably your API of choice. The PS3 uses OpenGL-ES and most other consoles (PS2/Wii/etc) have their own API (some of them OpenGL-like, I think), so I'm not sure if DX would the far more common choice.
The PS3 supports OpenGL-ES but it’s hardly used today. Most developers use the native API. As it use Cg as shader language it is easier to port from Direct3D than from OpenGL.

Posted by Killer-Kris on Sunday, 04-Nov-07 20:03:26 UTC
I still don't get why Mesa itself needs the online compression but rather the driver , ala how it works under windows.


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