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The reason why OpenGL is seen as more unappealing than DirectX is because it is more unappealing. The debugging tools mentioned are bad, much worse than PIX. Th

by Meai 14y ago

The reason why OpenGL is seen as more unappealing than DirectX is because it is more unappealing. The debugging tools mentioned are bad, much worse than PIX. They do not offer a way to trace back a pixel and see what caused it to be red, or whatever else. On Win8 they constantly crash on me. OpenGL error handling is a ton of work. What do I do if something stops working? I pretty much scatter as many glGetError() all over my code until I find one place where it returns something. The extension system is very hard to understand for beginners and I count myself to that group. First you get a different extension loader recommended to you by every tutorial you find, then you have to set them up differently, sometimes there's only a Linux makefile and what do you do if you get some weird error? How do you check whether it's a missing extension, a bug in your code or a driver bug? Apparently you can't and you are supposed to start praying. Sorry for the tone, I guess the time lost had an effect on me.

nglevin 14y ago
For PIX alternatives, you might want to give apitrace a try. Valve's Linux team was raving about it at this year's SIGGRAPH OpenGL BoF. http://apitrace.github.com http://apitrace.github.com Still receiving frequent updates and new features. It's been exciting to see it come together. My biggest caveat has been the OpenGL ES support on Android. It only builds properly on Linux, and it doesn't support performance profiling the last time I checked. You're better off using vendor specific tools like Nvidia's PerfHud ES for Tegra devices and PVRTrace for PowerVR devices for that sort of work. There's also no support for OpenGL ES on iOS devices. Fortunately, Apple's OpenGL ES profiling tools for Xcode are (surprisingly) quite solid, and much less of a pain in the butt to set up than any Android OpenGL ES solution. As long as you're content with there being only one game in that town. EDIT: And for taming GL Extension Hell, GLEW is still the best; http://glew.sourceforge.net http://glew.sourceforge.net . If you see a tutorial that suggests anything else, it's wrong. :)

by Meai 14y ago

nglevin 14y ago

For PIX alternatives, you might want to give apitrace a try. Valve's Linux team was raving about it at this year's SIGGRAPH OpenGL BoF. http://apitrace.github.com http://apitrace.github.com Still receiving frequent updates and new features. It's been exciting to see it come together. My biggest caveat has been the OpenGL ES support on Android. It only builds properly on Linux, and it doesn't support performance profiling the last time I checked. You're better off using vendor specific tools like Nvidia's PerfHud ES for Tegra devices and PVRTrace for PowerVR devices for that sort of work. There's also no support for OpenGL ES on iOS devices. Fortunately, Apple's OpenGL ES profiling tools for Xcode are (surprisingly) quite solid, and much less of a pain in the butt to set up than any Android OpenGL ES solution. As long as you're content with there being only one game in that town. EDIT: And for taming GL Extension Hell, GLEW is still the best; http://glew.sourceforge.net http://glew.sourceforge.net . If you see a tutorial that suggests anything else, it's wrong. :)