[Skarab]

I'm no coder by any stretch of the imagination, but I came across this article and figured it might be of some interest to those of you that are coders.  The article seems a little light on specific details.

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-aims-to-give-opengl-a-big-boost-api-wont-be-the-bottleneck/

I've no idea if this will end up meaning much to FSO, but I recall AMD drivers being occasionally problematic for some users here.

[Fury]

If I understand that right, AMD is planning to expose hardware capability through unofficial extensions? In my opinion that is hardly useful at all, because these extensions won't work on anything but AMD GPU's and even then might be more or less limited by GPU generations. These are only useful when you really want every last ounce of performance from certain range of AMD GPU's.

While I am not a coder myself either, I don't see any benefit from tangling FSO with GPU vendor specific, GPU generation specific or GPU specific extensions. Too much trouble for very little gain. Official OpenGL extensions or bust.

[Flaser]

If I understand that right, AMD is planning to expose hardware capability through unofficial extensions? In my opinion that is hardly useful at all, because these extensions won't work on anything but AMD GPU's and even then might be more or less limited by GPU generations. These are only useful when you really want every last ounce of performance from certain range of AMD GPU's.

While I am not a coder myself either, I don't see any benefit from tangling FSO with GPU vendor specific, GPU generation specific or GPU specific extensions. Too much trouble for very little gain. Official OpenGL extensions or bust.

...on PC.

Say, you have a console using AMD hardware, and for *whatever* reason you're not using DirectX.
In that case, you just gained some extra "horsepower" to play with.

...but this has nothing to do with FSO.

[The E]

If Mantle really is that big of an improvement, and if Nvidia rolls out their own implementation, we might be inclined to support such a code path.

However, at the moment, this is not a good idea. We have no idea what those extensions are going to do, we have absolutely no clue how they're going to be supported on Linux and MacOS (My guess? MacOS won't see these things, ever). Utilizing vendor-specific functionality is something we can only do if there are significant benefits to doing so, and if the variant code paths are reasonably easy to write and maintain.