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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: aldo_14 on August 07, 2005, 03:25:50 pm

Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: aldo_14 on August 07, 2005, 03:25:50 pm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/06/177251&from=rss

This pisses me off; I've just started learning OGL (initially through the Java JOGL bindings).  If it's true, it's simple de-riguer MS uncompetitive practice.... incidenatally, IIRC the Doom 3 engine in particular uses OGL.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: mikhael on August 07, 2005, 03:45:22 pm
FUD.

If Microsoft doesn't provide a modern OpenGL ICD that isn't implemented on top of DirectX, someone else will. Don't forget: that's how we got hardware accelerated OpenGL under Windows in the first place. It was originally a Microsoft software ICD.

I'd not worry about it.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: vyper on August 07, 2005, 03:52:51 pm
Did you just call him a fud?
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Martinus on August 07, 2005, 03:54:12 pm
[color=66ff00]Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUD
[/color]
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: vyper on August 07, 2005, 04:15:43 pm
Oh. :lol:
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: ChronoReverse on August 07, 2005, 04:37:24 pm
Yeah, that's just FUD against MS (instead of from MS).

So MS won't provide really nice OGL with Vista.  Whoopty doo, that's how it's always been.  The cideo vendors will just release their own accelerated drivers for OGL.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kosh on August 07, 2005, 04:43:04 pm
To think, if Bush didn't win the election, then the anti-trust suit against M$ wouldn't have been dropped (probably). Probably the finest example of political corruption in recent history, IMO. But, that is slightly off topic.

@Mikhael: You're probably right, but it is the idea of it that rubs people the wrong way. This is just M$ trying to use their monopoly to....."encourage" people to use their proprietary stuff.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Roanoke on August 07, 2005, 04:48:37 pm
Quote
Originally posted by Kosh
To think, if Bush didn't win the election, then the anti-trust suit against M$ wouldn't have been dropped (probably). Probably the finest example of political corruption in recent history, IMO. But, that is slightly off topic.


It's not corruption, it's "backing", or "support".
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kamikaze on August 07, 2005, 06:09:40 pm
There was a good comment in the /. discussion about this. It boiled down to Direct3d needs full access to the hardware for hardware acceleration and doesn't play well with OpenGL for technical reasons. So the only way to run OpenGL reasonably is by running it on top of OpenGL (Sorta like how Winex is running Direct3d on top of OpenGL).

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158252&cid=13260377

Now, the problem could be solved by MS dropping their Direct3D thing entirely and using OpenGL. But alas, OpenGL is an open standard...
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Bobboau on August 07, 2005, 06:18:05 pm
I don't see how there suposed to do this, OGL can do a lot of things that d3d can't (though everything D3D can do OGL can). further more, I don't see how it's suposed to be such a huge perfomence drain, most calls in D3D and OGL have an almost 1 to 1 relationship.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: mikhael on August 07, 2005, 07:14:25 pm
Sure. There's a 1:1 correlation. And so you end up with, at least, twice as much time in function indirection. But it would actually be worse, because you're not really going to do 1:1 function wrappers. You're going to have an "OpenGL" function that spends some time massaging arguments before passing them on to a DirectX function.

Of course, this all assumes that no one bothers to write sane and/or clever compiler optimizations to handle all this.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: MatthewPapa on August 07, 2005, 07:32:29 pm
*has just downloaded windows vista from MSDN*
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kazan on August 07, 2005, 09:34:43 pm
microsoft would code their indirection in an incompetant manner intentionally
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Scuddie on August 07, 2005, 09:45:48 pm
lol... That's going in my sig :D
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: IceFire on August 07, 2005, 10:33:17 pm
As someone says....its probably fear mongering.  Although our little corners of the internet universe is relatively small...the three kinds of hell that would be raised if a game like Doom 3 didn't function properly would be enough to set MS straight.

We'll see...

The sky hasn't fallen yet...

Heck...they even removed Palladium...there is hope.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Scuddie on August 07, 2005, 10:43:25 pm
Don't be so sure.  Palladium might be here, just working at a more discrete level.  Once TCPA is fully integrated, you might take that statement back.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Bobboau on August 07, 2005, 11:14:09 pm
@mik: this is true, however I don't see how that w...should result in a 50% performence drop, but as Kaz pointed out, they have a vested interest in people not useing OGL.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kamikaze on August 07, 2005, 11:23:21 pm
Well, using Wine (Windows compatibility layer for *nix) to play games is extremely slow (easily a 50% performance drop). Wine is basically doing the same thing as the MS OGL but in reverse, taking DirectX calls and using OpenGL instead.

Then again, there's overhead for simulating the other parts of Windows in Wine's case.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kazan on August 08, 2005, 08:09:42 am
Kamikaze: except Wine has to do a hell of a lot more - because it's translating win32 API calls into X instructions and they're not even remotely related.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: aldo_14 on August 08, 2005, 10:26:43 am
As an aside, reportedly MS block updates (http://winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2005/02/0441.html) to software installed on wine using machines.
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: Kazan on August 08, 2005, 10:37:46 am
except i believe a workaround to that has already been made :D
Title: Windows Vista May Degrade OpenGL
Post by: aldo_14 on August 08, 2005, 10:58:07 am
Well, it is Microsoft security after all........ :D

Me, I'd have thought they'd want to try and open up the Linux market to stuff like office, what with the increasing number of governments switching to Open Source OS' (cheaper and secure, of course).  But why try compete when it's easier to (try to) batter the competition into submission.