8 ms·

Why is Minecraft mentioned several times in the post?

wirybeige 1y ago
The post links to this: https://github.com/MCRcortex/nvidium https://github.com/MCRcortex/nvidium nvidium is using GL_NV_mesh_shader which is only available for nVIDIA cards. This mod is the only game/mod I know of that uses mesh shaders & is OpenGL. & so the new gl extension will let users of other vendors use the mod if it gets updated to use the new extension.
mellinoe 1y ago
Presumably because Minecraft is the only application which still uses OpenGL but would use the extension
doubletwoyou 1y ago
pretty sure the base minecraft rendering engine is still using opengl, and most of the improvement mods also just use opengl so exposing this extension to them is probably important to a game where its 50 billion simple cubes being rendered
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
Is Minecraft the only thing using OpenGL anymore? What is the current state of OpenGL, I thought it had faded away?
- aj_hackman 1y ago
  It's officially deprecated in favor of Vulkan, but it will likely live on for decades to come due to legacy CAD software and a bunch of older games still using it. I don't share the distaste many have for it, it's good to have a cross-platform medium-complexity graphics API for doing the 90% of rendering that isn't cutting-edge AAA gaming.
  - m-schuetz 1y ago
    OpenGL is going to live a long life simply because Vulkan is way more complex and overengineered than it needs to be.
    - jsheard 1y ago
      It's steadily getting better as they keep walking back aspects which turned out to be needlessly complex, or only needed to be complex for the sake of older hardware that hardly anyone cares about anymore, but yeah there's still a way to go. Those simpler ways of doing things are just grafted onto the side of the existing API surface so just knowing which parts you're supposed to use is a battle in itself. Hopefully they'll eventually do a clean-slate Vulkan 2.0 to tidy up the cruft, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
      - m-schuetz 1y ago
        Might be getting better but just yesterday I dabbled in Vulkan again, digging through the examples from https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, and the complexity is pure insanity. What should be a simple malloc ends up being 40 lines of code, what should be a simple memcpy is another 30 lines of code, and what should be a single-line kernel launch is another 50 lines of bindings, layouts, pipelines, etc.
        flohofwoe 1y ago
        Tbf, a lot of the complexity (also in the official Khronos samples) is caused by insane C++ abstraction layers and 'helper frameworks' on top of the actual Vulkan C API. Just directly talking to the C API in the tutorials/examples instead of custom wrapper code would be a lot more helpful since you'd don't need to sift through the custom abstraction layers (even if it would be slightly more code). E.g. have a look at the code snippets in here and weep in despair ;) https://docs.vulkan.org/tutorial/latest/03_Drawing_a_triangle/00_Setup/03_Physical_devices_and_queue_families.html https://docs.vulkan.org/tutorial/latest/03_Drawing_a_triangl...
        1y ago
- kbolino 1y ago
  I don't think any major platform that ever supported OpenGL or OpenGL ES--including desktops, smartphones/tablets, and web browsers--has actually removed it yet. Apple will probably be the first to pull the plug, but they've only aggressively deprecated it so far.
  - jhasse 1y ago
    How exactly is it aggressiv? I'm selling games using OpenGL on iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and macOS, works with all of their latest hardware. I'm not getting a warning or any sign from them that they will remove support.
    - kbolino 1y ago
      It was my understanding (which could definitely be wrong) that their OpenGL support is both behind the times--which is impressive since OpenGL has received no major new features AFAIK in the past decade, the topic of this HN post notwithstanding--and won't even get any bugfixes.
    - charlotte-fyi 1y ago
      The last supported version they ship doesn't support compute, which is a pretty big limitation.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  It's super frequently recommended as a starting point for learners because it's high level enough to get something on the screen in ten lines of code but low level enough to teach you the fundamentals of how the rendering pipeline works (even though GL's abstraction is rather anachronistic and differs from how modern GPUs actually work). Vulkan (requiring literally a thousand LoC worth of initialization to render a single triangle) is emphatically not any sort of replacement for that use case (and honestly not for 95% of hobbyist/indie use cases either unless you use a high-level abstraction on top of it). The worst thing about OpenGL is probably the hilariously non-typesafe C API.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    I believe the modern OpenGL replacement would be WebGPU, which is not just made for browsers, and which isn't as low-level as Vulkan or DirectX 12.

The post links to this: https://github.com/MCRcortex/nvidium https://github.com/MCRcortex/nvidium nvidium is using GL_NV_mesh_shader which is only available for nVIDIA cards. This mod is the only game/mod I know of that uses mesh shaders & is OpenGL. & so the new gl extension will let users of other vendors use the mod if it gets updated to use the new extension.

mellinoe 1y ago

Presumably because Minecraft is the only application which still uses OpenGL but would use the extension

doubletwoyou 1y ago

pretty sure the base minecraft rendering engine is still using opengl, and most of the improvement mods also just use opengl so exposing this extension to them is probably important to a game where its 50 billion simple cubes being rendered

FrustratedMonky 1y ago

Is Minecraft the only thing using OpenGL anymore? What is the current state of OpenGL, I thought it had faded away?

aj_hackman 1y ago
It's officially deprecated in favor of Vulkan, but it will likely live on for decades to come due to legacy CAD software and a bunch of older games still using it. I don't share the distaste many have for it, it's good to have a cross-platform medium-complexity graphics API for doing the 90% of rendering that isn't cutting-edge AAA gaming.
- m-schuetz 1y ago
  OpenGL is going to live a long life simply because Vulkan is way more complex and overengineered than it needs to be.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    It's steadily getting better as they keep walking back aspects which turned out to be needlessly complex, or only needed to be complex for the sake of older hardware that hardly anyone cares about anymore, but yeah there's still a way to go. Those simpler ways of doing things are just grafted onto the side of the existing API surface so just knowing which parts you're supposed to use is a battle in itself. Hopefully they'll eventually do a clean-slate Vulkan 2.0 to tidy up the cruft, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
    - m-schuetz 1y ago
      Might be getting better but just yesterday I dabbled in Vulkan again, digging through the examples from https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, and the complexity is pure insanity. What should be a simple malloc ends up being 40 lines of code, what should be a simple memcpy is another 30 lines of code, and what should be a single-line kernel launch is another 50 lines of bindings, layouts, pipelines, etc.
      - flohofwoe 1y ago
        Tbf, a lot of the complexity (also in the official Khronos samples) is caused by insane C++ abstraction layers and 'helper frameworks' on top of the actual Vulkan C API. Just directly talking to the C API in the tutorials/examples instead of custom wrapper code would be a lot more helpful since you'd don't need to sift through the custom abstraction layers (even if it would be slightly more code). E.g. have a look at the code snippets in here and weep in despair ;) https://docs.vulkan.org/tutorial/latest/03_Drawing_a_triangle/00_Setup/03_Physical_devices_and_queue_families.html https://docs.vulkan.org/tutorial/latest/03_Drawing_a_triangl...
      - 1y ago
kbolino 1y ago
I don't think any major platform that ever supported OpenGL or OpenGL ES--including desktops, smartphones/tablets, and web browsers--has actually removed it yet. Apple will probably be the first to pull the plug, but they've only aggressively deprecated it so far.
- jhasse 1y ago
  How exactly is it aggressiv? I'm selling games using OpenGL on iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and macOS, works with all of their latest hardware. I'm not getting a warning or any sign from them that they will remove support.
  - kbolino 1y ago
    It was my understanding (which could definitely be wrong) that their OpenGL support is both behind the times--which is impressive since OpenGL has received no major new features AFAIK in the past decade, the topic of this HN post notwithstanding--and won't even get any bugfixes.
  - charlotte-fyi 1y ago
    The last supported version they ship doesn't support compute, which is a pretty big limitation.
Sharlin 1y ago
It's super frequently recommended as a starting point for learners because it's high level enough to get something on the screen in ten lines of code but low level enough to teach you the fundamentals of how the rendering pipeline works (even though GL's abstraction is rather anachronistic and differs from how modern GPUs actually work). Vulkan (requiring literally a thousand LoC worth of initialization to render a single triangle) is emphatically not any sort of replacement for that use case (and honestly not for 95% of hobbyist/indie use cases either unless you use a high-level abstraction on top of it). The worst thing about OpenGL is probably the hilariously non-typesafe C API.
- cubefox 1y ago
  I believe the modern OpenGL replacement would be WebGPU, which is not just made for browsers, and which isn't as low-level as Vulkan or DirectX 12.