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He's referring to mindshare among professional (game) engine developers - those people who try to get maximum rendering performance out of multiple platforms. H

He's referring to mindshare among professional (game) engine developers - those people who try to get maximum rendering performance out of multiple platforms. His statement is totally on target for reasons I enumerated with a blog article on this subject back in December: http://inovaekeith.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-opengl-probably-isnt-graphics-api.html http://inovaekeith.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-opengl-probably-... As for WebGL Apple intentionally disables WebGL support on iOS - except for in iAds - so game devs can't circumvent the app store. Since WebGL is needlessly restricted to the feature set of the OpenGL ES specification its usefulness is severely limited. WebGL also has many other problems such as the fact that JavaScript is slow as hell.

azakai 12y ago
I read the blogpost, but it seems to focus on why OpenGL isn't good - not on measuring mindshare of OpenGL? Yes, perhaps Mantle and DirectX are better, and that might in theory lead to more mindshare. But the fact remains that OpenGL is standard on mobile and on the web, which should increase OpenGL's mindshare. Yes, WebGL is disabled on iOS. It's disabled on OS X desktop too, for now. Hopefully that will change soon. > JavaScript is slow as hell. I wouldn't say that 67% of native speed is "slow as hell", and that's where things currently stand. Perhaps you have a specific workload in mind that happens to be slow - how did you measure?
- corillian 12y ago
  The blog states that if the Mantle specification is adopted by other manufacturers, particularly on mobile, then it will become the new cross platform standard and OpenGL will cease to be relevant. 67% of native speed is astronomically slow in the world of real-time games where improving per-frame performance by 3ms is considered a huge win. Getting all of your nice special effects and post-processing implemented while still running at a smooth 60fps is very difficult - especially on mobile.
  - azakai 12y ago
    I see, thanks. Yes, if that happens it could certainly upset OpenGL's position. What, though, is the likelihood of that happening? Have there been signs of cross-vendor Mantle adoption, and of support by the OS vendors Google and Apple?
  - greggman 12y ago
    > Getting all of your nice special effects and post-processing implemented while still running at a smooth 60fps is very difficult And has very little to do with CPU speed. There are some games where CPU speed is important but there's a large subset (I'd be willing to bet 95%) of AAA games where only GPU speed is important and they run just fine on low end CPUs.
    - Locke1689 12y ago
      Source? My experience with low-latency programming suggests that often the biggest cost is memory management -- garbage collection. In some cases, the GC compacter may even be limited by CPU, although usually its the collection pauses themselves which hurt the most.
    - corillian 12y ago
      The whole point of D3D12 and Mantle is to decrease driver overhead, improve multi-threading support, and increase the number of per-frame draw calls that can be made. Those are all CPU performance improvements so I think it's safe to say that CPU speed is quite important or else AMD and Microsoft wouldn't be going through the trouble.
    - sharpneli 12y ago
      Just an example: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh-review-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/12 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh... There is an reason why review sites use games for CPU benchmarks. As you can see some games are indeed GPU bound. But vast majority is actually bit of both, e.g some section of it is purely CPU bound while another is purely GPU bound. So improving either component will increase FPS.

azakai 12y ago

I read the blogpost, but it seems to focus on why OpenGL isn't good - not on measuring mindshare of OpenGL? Yes, perhaps Mantle and DirectX are better, and that might in theory lead to more mindshare. But the fact remains that OpenGL is standard on mobile and on the web, which should increase OpenGL's mindshare. Yes, WebGL is disabled on iOS. It's disabled on OS X desktop too, for now. Hopefully that will change soon. > JavaScript is slow as hell. I wouldn't say that 67% of native speed is "slow as hell", and that's where things currently stand. Perhaps you have a specific workload in mind that happens to be slow - how did you measure?

corillian 12y ago
The blog states that if the Mantle specification is adopted by other manufacturers, particularly on mobile, then it will become the new cross platform standard and OpenGL will cease to be relevant. 67% of native speed is astronomically slow in the world of real-time games where improving per-frame performance by 3ms is considered a huge win. Getting all of your nice special effects and post-processing implemented while still running at a smooth 60fps is very difficult - especially on mobile.
- azakai 12y ago
  I see, thanks. Yes, if that happens it could certainly upset OpenGL's position. What, though, is the likelihood of that happening? Have there been signs of cross-vendor Mantle adoption, and of support by the OS vendors Google and Apple?
- greggman 12y ago
  > Getting all of your nice special effects and post-processing implemented while still running at a smooth 60fps is very difficult And has very little to do with CPU speed. There are some games where CPU speed is important but there's a large subset (I'd be willing to bet 95%) of AAA games where only GPU speed is important and they run just fine on low end CPUs.
  - Locke1689 12y ago
    Source? My experience with low-latency programming suggests that often the biggest cost is memory management -- garbage collection. In some cases, the GC compacter may even be limited by CPU, although usually its the collection pauses themselves which hurt the most.
  - corillian 12y ago
    The whole point of D3D12 and Mantle is to decrease driver overhead, improve multi-threading support, and increase the number of per-frame draw calls that can be made. Those are all CPU performance improvements so I think it's safe to say that CPU speed is quite important or else AMD and Microsoft wouldn't be going through the trouble.
  - sharpneli 12y ago
    Just an example: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh-review-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/12 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh... There is an reason why review sites use games for CPU benchmarks. As you can see some games are indeed GPU bound. But vast majority is actually bit of both, e.g some section of it is purely CPU bound while another is purely GPU bound. So improving either component will increase FPS.