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Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

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31–40 of 118 posts

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#31
post #22
post #8

Kind of crazy to think that the only reason OpenGL was ever a thing for 3D gaming was because of John Carmack's obsession with using it for Quake II back in the 90s.

And yet it still got its ass kicked by Direct3D because Microsoft made better stuff. Better API, better tooling, better debuggability. Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so.

Ye good ol' Microsoft stiffled OpenGL on Windows, hence open letter https://www.chrishecker.com/OpenGL/Press_Release not to mention insidious thing they did on Fahrenheit (next gen OpenGL+Direct3D, one to rule them all) when they were supposed to be working on it together with SGI. Microsoft did a well job after with it, but they were and are a shit company that made sus maneuvers to make success; Not all of them technical.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#32
This endeavour proofs to me skills beat talkativeness every single day. Just reading the blogs sets my brain on fire. There is so much to unpack. The punch line is not the last but the second sentence, nevertheless you're forced to follow the path into the rabbit hole until you enjoy reading one bit manipulation after the other.

If there ever are benchmarks with eureka effects per paragraph Alyssa will lead them all.

Just thanks!

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it still got its ass kicked by Direct3D because Microsoft made better stuff. Better API, better tooling, better debuggability. Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so.

Well, except for only working on xbox and windows, which pretty much destroys it as a viable direct target for modern games or apps. > Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so. If you remember what Microsoft was like in those days, the chances of D3D being standardized in a viable way on any platform but windows were about the same c…

Technically, also Linux (and probably other Vulkan platforms) with dxvk.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#34

This is obviously very exciting, but—why not target Vulkan first? It seems like the more salient target these days and one on top of which we already have an OpenGL implementation.

I thought something similar, but from their comments, to support OpenGL over Vulkan you need higher versions of Vulkan anyway and it's still a big effort. So they decided to go with (lower versions of) OpenGL first to get something functional sooner.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks like apple silicon are currently the best hardware for running linux and linux is the best OS for apple silicon machines Blender has Metal support for Apple Silicon macs. The Metal API is better architected (largely due to being more modern and being developed with benefit of hindsight) so all things equal I'd pick the Metal version on Mac. In case you missed it in the article, the M1 GPU does not natively su…

Right, Blender Cycles for example can run on Metal, but neither on OpenGL or Vulkan. So while it's nice to have a working OpenGL, it depends if your workflow requires OpenGL apps.

I would be very surprised, if Blender Cycles ever ran on top of OpenGL or Vulkan other than using OpenGL or Vulkan as a loader for compute shaders.

That's why it is running as CUDA/OptiX/HIP/oneAPI on Windows and Linux.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#36
post #24

"Unlike the vendor’s non-conformant 4.1 drivers, our open source Linux drivers are conformant to the latest OpenGL versions, finally promising broad compatibility with modern OpenGL workloads, like Blender, Ryujinx, and Citra." Looks like apple silicon are currently the best hardware for running linux and linux is the best OS for apple silicon machines.

Still waiting for some hardware support and hardware video decoding.

Hardware video decoding is well on the way: https://github.com/eiln/avd

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#37
post #21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that it was the only reason, but Carmack’s push for OpenGL certainly helped. A lot of things related to 3D games are thanks to doom and Quake.

> A lot of things related to 3D games are thanks to doom and Quake. Quake sure, but Doom? IIRC Doom is far more like Wolf3D's 2.5D/raycasting than the "true 3D" of Quake, it cpu rendered to a frame buffer with zero hardware acceleration. I find it hard to believe it made any lasting impact on any subsequent 3D rendering APIs.

Quake didn't use hardware acceleration either. It was only the later VQuake and GLQuake releases that did.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#38
post #8

Kind of crazy to think that the only reason OpenGL was ever a thing for 3D gaming was because of John Carmack's obsession with using it for Quake II back in the 90s.

Quake is just (a probably small (not wanting to dimish it, of course)) part of the history. SGI and the enormous effort to get compliant implementations on many different systems and architectures are what made OpenGL what it eventually became.

I think both SGI and Quake were absolutely crucial.

Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space.

Quake (and Quake 2, and Quake 3, and the many games that licensed those engines) really opened the floodgates in terms of mass market users demanding OpenGL capabilities (or at least a subset of them) from their hardware and drivers.

I'm not sure how to measure this in an objective way, but if the mass market of PC gamers didn't dwarf the professional CAD/modeling market by several orders of magnitude, I will print out my HN posting history and eat it.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of things related to 3D games are thanks to doom and Quake. Quake sure, but Doom? IIRC Doom is far more like Wolf3D's 2.5D/raycasting than the "true 3D" of Quake, it cpu rendered to a frame buffer with zero hardware acceleration. I find it hard to believe it made any lasting impact on any subsequent 3D rendering APIs.

Quake didn't use hardware acceleration either. It was only the later VQuake and GLQuake releases that did.

I think for the purposes of this discussion "Quake" is acceptable shorthand for GLQuake, Quake 2, Quake 3, all the games that used those engines, etc.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#40
post #29

This is obviously very exciting, but—why not target Vulkan first? It seems like the more salient target these days and one on top of which we already have an OpenGL implementation.

They started with targeting older OpenGL to get a basic feature set working first. I guess from there, getting up to a more recent OpenGL was less work than doing a complete Vulkan implementation, and they probably learned a lot about what they'll need to do for Vulkan.

Ok, this makes a lot of sense—OpenGL sort of forms a pathway of incremental support.
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