The fragmentation of OpenGL is enough of a headache, but at least it offers some semblance of "write once, run anywhere." The introduction of Mantle and Metal, plus the longstanding existence of Direct3d, makes me worry that OpenGL will get no love. And then we'll have to write our graphics code, three, four, or goodness knows how many times.
I know: It's not realistic to expect "write once, run anywhere" for any app that pushes the capabilities of the GPU. But what about devs like me (of whom there are many) that aren't trying to achieve AAA graphics, but just want the very basics? For us, "write once, run anywhere" is very attractive and should be possible. I can do everything I want with GL 2.1, I don't need to push a massive number of polys, I don't need a huge textures, and I don't need advanced lighting.
Contrary to FOSS beliefs, consoles never had proper OpenGL support anyway, so game studios already had to take care of multiple APIs on their engines.
I can't see Khronos making the same fuck up twice, as they did with Longs Peak.
Yeah, it means depreciating a bunch of 3.x shit, and probably making another profile, but this time they better do it right.
2 years? in two years time nvidia will have their next line of GPUs out (pascal), intel will have launched knights landing (the many core xeon), and the next version of OS X will be released. 2 years is a long time, and it will already be behind the curve from it's announcement. khronos have a history of stagnation and disappointment.
> I can't see Khronos making the same fuck up twice, as they did with Longs Peak.
i think you may be mis-under-estimating khronos..
The problem with OpenGL is legacy code and committee hell.
If something works, like precompiled shaders, OpenGL committee will include it in the future spec.
I use OpenGL for very simple things, OpenGL needs to loose weight and get slim. I am certainly not satisfied with OGL 2.1. It is a design that does not make sense anymore with actual hardware(it did like 10 years ago).
Independent dev writing low poly apps for multiple platforms is the Unity use case.
OpenGL 2.1 will be supported forever, don't worry, since you don't need anything more than GL2.1 it will run everywhere.
OpenGL isn't exactly a product. There's no company that "writes" the OpenGL software. Rather, it's a specification published by a consortium. "Writing" the OpenGL libraries is a task that each GPU maker does independently. So you have a bunch of different implementations of the same API.
For a long time, GPU makers have focused their attention on DirectX and done a lackluster job with their OpenGL implementations. If APIs like DirectX and Metal continue to proliferate, there will be less and less time and less incentive to maintain a good OpenGL implementation.
1. Is it open and cross platform?
2. Is it going to be supported across all GPU vendors?
If either of those is no, than it's a failure from the start and just another walled garden thing.
I suspect iOS is popular enough to make this work.
that remains to be seen, especially given how similar all the GPUs are today.
if it weren't for the longs peak shambles, we might not need Mantle/Metal.
And this is exactly what happened, first OpenGL (through AMD's extension for now at least), then Microsoft with DirectX 12 [1], and now Apple, too.
Before you get too excited, though, remember Mantle "only" improved the overall performance of Battlefield 4 by about 50%. It can probably get better than that, but don't expect "10x" improvement or anything close to it.
[1] - http://semiaccurate.com/2014/03/18/microsoft-adopts-mantle-c...
http://hothardware.com/News/New-Reports-Claim-Microsofts-Dir...
Either way, it will make it easier to bolt a monster GPU onto a smaller, more efficient CPU.
(What we do about GPU power consumption is a different problem...)
According to this blog entry, you are mistaken, and it really can improve performanec 54% in a multi-GPU rig.
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/news/view/bf4-mantle-li...
There seem to be issues with FPS drop, though ('stutter').
See the "Small Batch Problem" section in this PDF: http://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle_White_Paper.pdf
(Not that that refutes what you're saying, I'm just saying that most serious engines are in the same category as BF4 when it comes to gains from better driver APIs)
Am I alone here? I'm running Linux everywhere from home to my office for years, and my tablet/cellphone is Android-based.
(quick edit: You saw a lot of Apple news because the WWDC keynote was today)
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
The shading language appears to be precompiled (which is sorely missing from OpenGL) and based somewhat on C++11.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
My concern is drivers: drivers for video cards on OS X haven't been as good as Windows drivers. That, and of course the specter of another platform-specific API. This invites a comparison with Mantle. I don't think either Metal or Mantle will "win", but they're good prototypes for the next generation of GPU APIs.
Just for instance, Apple sell an extremely expensive workstation with two very powerful graphics cards. Providing better ways to use a Mac Pro's GPUs is a good way to sell more Mac Pros, and a way to unlock more computational power as the power of CPU cores has levelled off.
But yes, OpenCL with its basic C API is way behind what CUDA offers in terms of language support.
Maybe SPIR will fix it, but it remains to be seen if anyone on HPC will care.
strange, language support is really the only thing that CUDA doesn't have over OpenCL. there are C++ (and python, Java, various others) bindings for host code, at least. if you're looking to use device intrinsics in your kernel code (at the cost of portability) then blame nvidia for not exposing it (and for their lack of support for OpenCL in general).
> Maybe SPIR will fix it, but it remains to be seen if anyone on HPC will care.
yes, there are people doing HPC that care.
If so, I think I recall seeing the screen which models are eligible and I think the 4S was the first on the screen. Going up all the way to the 5S.
So, I think everything before and including the iPhone 4 will be left out?
