Open GL and Open GL ES successor

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scharfshutze009

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From what I read Valve, EA, Epic Games, and Unity Technologies are planning to unify OpenGL and OpenGL ES into one API that will not be compatible with existing OpenGL versions called Vulkan. I don't like the sound of it because it sounds, like it will force me to buy all new hard or at least graphics cards and will it still be Open Source. Also who will own the rights to the API and will it be all the companies involved in the ground up redesign of OpenGL. Another thing why the hell do OpenGL ES and OpenGL need merged into one API for 2D and 3D when ES already does 2D and 3D even if it doesn't combine OpenGL with it. I don't like AMD Mantle either and I don't think either one is going be widely accepted across platforms especially Mantle because it's not cross platform. I know I don't care about Mantle and being restricted to AMD cards to have to use it and the same goes for Vulkan if it applies to that too. If it does apply to Vulkan I hope it doesn't effect my ability to run steam on other distros of Linux besides SteamOS. I also hope it doesn't restrict me to having to buy a steam machine to play games on steam either, even though I currently fully support Valve's console because it's customizable and brings official Steam support to Linux.
 
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OP: the current OpenGL APIs are a mess and Khronos has been working on the successor for years, particularly to get rid of all the legacy cruft and modernize the API to work better on newer hardware. There is nothing that will keep a system from having OpenGL and Vulkan running on the same system if it's supported by the hardware and the GPU vendor includes Vulkan support for that GPU (on the particular OS).

Don't worry about the new API. Due to the relatively small % of existing gaming cards that will be capable of running Vulkan compared to D3D, it's unlikely that there will be many Vulkan games at all for a loooooonnnnnnnnggggggggg while, or possibly ever on Windows. The hodgepodge of "open" APIs needed to replace all the functionality in DX has never driven many Windows game developers away from DX over the past 15 years and that's unlikely to change any time soon. At best, Vulkan will have low level performance and capability equal to D3D 12 and that's not good enough to steal developer mindshare away from DX.

jimmyb said:
This is not a good post.
Click to expand...
lol, true.
 
Please explain why? I don't understand the problems with OpenGL completely because I haven't started programming with it yet and only have books for OpenGL 3.0 I think that I bought from Borders book store when they went out of business in the nearest city in my state. I was just concerned about the future of the API and how it would effect me.
 
pxc said:
OP: the current OpenGL APIs are a mess and Khronos has been working on the successor for years, particularly to get rid of all the legacy cruft and modernize the API to work better on newer hardware. There is nothing that will keep a system from having OpenGL and Vulkan running on the same system if it's supported by the hardware and the GPU vendor includes Vulkan support for that GPU (on the particular OS).

Don't worry about the new API. Due to the relatively small % of existing gaming cards that will be capable of running Vulkan compared to D3D, it's unlikely that there will be many Vulkan games at all for a loooooonnnnnnnnggggggggg while, or possibly ever on Windows. The hodgepodge of "open" APIs needed to replace all the functionality in DX has never driven many Windows game developers away from DX over the past 15 years and that's unlikely to change any time soon. At best, Vulkan will have low level performance and capability equal to D3D 12 and that's not good enough to steal developer mindshare away from DX.

lol, true.
Click to expand...

Thank you for clearing that up. It's a shame that Vulkan won't have support for while or as good as DX12 especially, since OpenGL is the only officially supported API on Linux and Vulkan is the future of the OpenGL API. I know one thing I have books on OpenGL, it's open source, and I don't have books for Direct X, which is not open source. Therefore, I'm ready as I can be to start programming in OpenGL, which is open source and not Direct X that isn't open source.
 
Open GL isn't open source. There's nothing to open source.

It's a specification.
 
socK said:
Open GL isn't open source. There's nothing to open source.

It's a specification.
Click to expand...
SGI makes an OpenGL sample implementation source code available to the public. Khronos makes a GL shader language compiler available as source. Plus Mesa is an open source implementation compatible with OpenGL.

I agree that the Open in OpenGL refers to the specification and APIs, but there is also source code available so people don't need to build an implementation from scratch (at least for compatibility with older versions of the standard).
 
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