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It's such a weird narrative. OpenGL is outdated anymore; the Khronos Group sponsored alternative to things like Metal is Vulkan, which wasn't even announced unt

by cwyers 7y ago

It's such a weird narrative. OpenGL is outdated anymore; the Khronos Group sponsored alternative to things like Metal is Vulkan, which wasn't even announced until after Metal was already shipping, much less finalized. Mantle came first, and nobody was ever going to adopt Mantle because it was an AMD product and nobody wanted to adopt a single GPU vendor's API wholesale like that. The two biggest platform vendors, Microsoft and Apple, managed to get Mantle-inspired APIs out years before Khronos got Vulkan out the door. What were Microsoft and Apple supposed to do? Wait? Force everyone to switch over as their APIs were gaining adoption?

pjmlp 7y ago
So let me rephrase it. Not supporting Vulkan on Windows (Only legacy ICD allows for it, outside Windows 10 sandbox), XBox, PlayStation (all models), Nintendo (all models other than Switch which has 2nd API, 1st being NVN) doesn't seem to affect game's quality. Mantle is inspired on what game consoles have been doing for years, so it isn't like Apple and Microsoft needed to wait for it anyway. Lack of tooling has been a common issue with Khronos and OpenGL ARB before them. Pretty good at releasing paper standards, not so much creating SDKs with all the required infrastruture that other APIs offer out of the box.
- cwyers 7y ago
  To be clear, I think you and I are mostly in agreement. The OpenGL/Vulkan advocates are consistently pushing things that really only benefit people who have decided to adopt OpenGL/Vulkan without a lot of real-world support for their positions. (Heck, I would go so far as to say that OpenGL as a vendor-agnostic API for consumer graphics cards might not have been possible if Microsoft hadn't forced some level of standardization across graphics card vendors in order to get Windows logo certifiation, and if Microsoft hadn't pushed Direct3D, we could all be stuck using Glide for some cards, a different API for other cards.)
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Yeah, I guess we are. :)

by cwyers 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

So let me rephrase it. Not supporting Vulkan on Windows (Only legacy ICD allows for it, outside Windows 10 sandbox), XBox, PlayStation (all models), Nintendo (all models other than Switch which has 2nd API, 1st being NVN) doesn't seem to affect game's quality. Mantle is inspired on what game consoles have been doing for years, so it isn't like Apple and Microsoft needed to wait for it anyway. Lack of tooling has been a common issue with Khronos and OpenGL ARB before them. Pretty good at releasing paper standards, not so much creating SDKs with all the required infrastruture that other APIs offer out of the box.

cwyers 7y ago
To be clear, I think you and I are mostly in agreement. The OpenGL/Vulkan advocates are consistently pushing things that really only benefit people who have decided to adopt OpenGL/Vulkan without a lot of real-world support for their positions. (Heck, I would go so far as to say that OpenGL as a vendor-agnostic API for consumer graphics cards might not have been possible if Microsoft hadn't forced some level of standardization across graphics card vendors in order to get Windows logo certifiation, and if Microsoft hadn't pushed Direct3D, we could all be stuck using Glide for some cards, a different API for other cards.)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Yeah, I guess we are. :)