OpenGL crippled under Windows Vista

[GKW]

Link

Is this the end of OpenGL on windows?  I think unless everyone on the OpenGL ARB get together and refuse to provide ICD's for win vista until OpenGL is promoted to a first class API MS will finally kill OpenGL.

[blahblahblahh]

Allegedly:

"Update 3: EASY TO USE
With Vista Microsoft wants to eliminate the long installation procedures that PC games have. Installing and playing a game should be as easy as with a console. They too are developing a special driver manager, so you won't have any problems with different drivers."

...so, Sun's several-year lead on decent game-shipping is about to be ripped away and replaced with something from a company with the brains to do something useful with it?

[William Denniss]

not good...

Will.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[GKW]

I was hoping this was just a rumor but a 3DLabs employee just confirmed it.  Not good at all.

[whome]

Few questions.
What is ICD?
Why is it needed to run OpenGL programs?
Why would OpenGL drivers just stop working in WinVista?

[Matzon]

This sounds bollocks somehow - a whole class of games will make Vista look like a worse OS than XP. Slowing adoption rate is not a good strategy.
We probably just have to wait for the hardware vendors to provide an OpenGL driver that works with Vista...

[arne]

And lots of people have in the meantime no way to run our good nice OpenGL games.
Because most users still use Windows it will make OpenGL look bad and not Windows   => predjudices will be created => people don't want to run OpenGL in the future because of that, even if hardware vendors have developed a new OpenGL driver.
 

[Alan_W]

Usual MS anti-competitive behaviour.   I used to look forward to os upgrades.  Now they're just a pain.

I don't know much about DirectX.  At what level could a graphics API be written which can be layered over directX or OpenGL?  Would it need abstraction at the scenegraph level to allow adequate tailoring and hence performance with each API?

Alan

Edit: Java3D runs with both I think?
Edit: Yep

The 1.3.2 version of Java 3D for Windows 2000, and Windows/XP requires the following:


JDK 1.4.2 or later from Sun Microsystems: http://java.sun.com/j2se/
Windows 2000 or Windows/XP
Support for either OpenGL or DirectX as shown below.

OpenGL version

The (default) OpenGL renderer of Java 3D requires OpenGL 1.1 or later, available from Microsoft or from your graphics card manufacturer.
DirectX version

The (optional) DirectX renderer of Java 3D requires DirectX 8.0 or later, which is available from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/ . The DirectX version of Java 3D is selected by setting the "j3d.rend" system property to "d3d", for example: "java -Dj3d.rend=d3d ClassName"

I'm not too keen on scenegraphs though

[aldacron]

I'm not too keen on scenegraphs though

Scengraphs have nothing to do with it. The renderer is what needs to be abstracted. You can code up a rendering interface and implementations for both OpenGL and D3D, then use that interface directly in your game, with a scenegraph, or whereever. Take a look at C++ graphics engines like OGRE, Irrlicht, or Dave Eberly's Wild Magic (which is nicely described in his book '3D Game Engine Architecture') for examples of abstract renderers with OpenGL and D3D implementations.

[f.l.x]

This is just the last movement of a campaing that M$ states against OpenGL, i was fearing something like this since they bought Silicon Graphics patents...

OpenGL will be out of the industry, despite two of the three main graphics engines are developed for OpenGL (UT2004 and Doom3).

what a pity...

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[erikd]

...two of the three main graphics engines are developed for OpenGL (UT2004 and Doom3).

Even though the UT2004 engine has openGL support, I think it uses the D3D renderer by default.
So that leaves only the Doom3 engine. I wouldn't be surprised at all if ID would make a D3D renderer for the Doom3 engine as it would be a very sensible thing to do.

Bad, bad news for us developers. Cross platform game development will now be even more difficult. I think the need for a D3D wrapper for java has just become very large now.

[f.l.x]

That's true, Unreal engine is Dx  d'oh!

anyway, this new has just ruined my day 

[kappa]

its not neccesarily a bad thing, for one all windows vistas will now support opengl, since it'll be based on dx, so more compatibility for a larger range of computers, especially for some of those older dx only cards, and second any decent card maker (nvida/ati etc) will all have there own implementation of it in the drivers sinces its industry standard now and they will implement there own opengl directly to get those extra fps, so sounds like a win, win situtation, mostly all new computers have manufacturer drivers and only a handful will use windows default drivers!

[GKW]

It's win-win if all you are interested in is OpenGL 1.4, without any extensions, and with a performance penalty.  The rest of us are screwed.

[kappa]

It's win-win if all you are interested in is OpenGL 1.4, without any extensions, and with a performance penalty.  The rest of us are screwed.

well it better than no opengl drivers, besides proper opengl will be provided by the video card driver makers

[princec]

This whole issue appears to be a FUD. M$ cannot afford to damage OpenGL capability.
What they're saying is that the version of openGL shipped with Vista will be 1.4. This is exactly the state of affairs as with XP, which is stuck at 1.1, except vastly better. The OEM card manufacters will then provide ICDs to give real applications extensions and 2.0 support, as before. To a gamer, there will be no discernable difference. To a professional doing CAD/CAM, there will probably be no discernable difference.

So just rejoice, because we're getting guaranteed 1.4 HW acceleration.

Cas

[Daire Quinlan]

Yeah, but from what I understand its the ICD mechanism itself that isn't going to work under their 'aeroglass' scheme. So for all intents and purposes its 1.4 with no extensions. I've never really checked out whats officially available in the various different versions of OGL because generally whats important is whatever set of extensions is exported by your driverset & card, I think I'll head off to opengl.org...

What isn't immediately apparent is what mechanism is going to be in place to switch from this (overhyped and unneccesary IMO) aeroglass thing to the conventional desktop where the standard way of doing things will apply. Is it automatic ? will there be some sort of API call to switch between the two ? does it happen when you switch into fullscreen mode ? Thats the real kicker. The farfetched worst case scenario is having to reboot into it or something equally laborious. That would really sound the death-knell for OGL games. However I don't think MS is going to intentially break whole slews of applications so I think it'll be relatively transparent.

D.

-edit-

Main changes in 1.5 and 2.0 were the addition of buffer objects (VBO's FBO's) , pixel shaders & OGSL , occlusion queries, addition of some shadow comparison operators, point sprites, NPT textures, and seperate stencil.

Now there's some esoteric stuff in there thats more for convenience sakes than anything else, but doing without VBO's ?? no shading language ? More to the point all these things are more hardware oriented, so you have to ask, why didn't MS actually settle on 2.0 as the base spec for OGL ? Theres an old saying "never attribute to malice what you can instead attribute to incompetence" but in this case I wouldn't be too sure. If they're locking off a standard at a particular revision number and disabling the commonly implemented way of ensuring update compliance then I'd argue that they have the obligation to ensure that they at LEAST do it at the latest revision at that point in time.

I guess only time will tell.

-edit-

[f.l.x]

Using ICD will deactivate the aeroglass "desktop manager", so, the mainstream user is going to see something like "I have installed the latests drivers for my video card and the desktop screwed up" -> "the drivers are crap". States like this going from mouth to ear and being sent to the cards manufacturers will force them to distribute directx-only drivers.

I see a problem there, users stuck at ogl1.4 and not wiling to update, loosing all the improvemenments

Main changes in 1.5 and 2.0 were the addition of buffer objects (VBO's FBO's) , pixel shaders & OGSL , occlusion queries, addition of some shadow comparison operators, point sprites, NPT textures, and seperate stencil.

But ogl is far from dead, with Sony supporting it trough ps3.

[endolf]

*This is a gues, and is based on no fact's*

I suspect that 'windows ccertified' drivers, like you get from 'name' manufactures like ATI and Nvidia will have some new driver architecture that MS has decided to use. What ever the new mechanism is, will allow the new drivers, that include openGL implementations, to co-exist with the aeroglass desktop. They might just be 'forcing' drivers to be what ever the new version of WHQL certified.

Time will tell

Endolf

[DD.Jarod]

Just some additional info about the topic:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=337097&whichpage=4&#2195831

For some first-hand informations look here:
"Windows Graphics Overview [WinHEC 2005; 171 KB]"
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05007_WinHEC05.ppt

"Advances in Display and Composition Architecture for Windows [WinHEC 2005; 422 KB]"
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05005_WinHEC05.ppt

[William Denniss]

It's funny that aeroglass can't run an OpenGL app in windowed mode.

I am using a swish 3D accellerated windowing system, and I can run windowed 3D accelerrated apps just fine, and I've been doing it for a year, and many people have been doing it for years before I started.

Will.

[swpalmer]

So that leaves only the Doom3 engine. I wouldn't be surprised at all if ID would make a D3D renderer for the Doom3 engine as it would be a very sensible thing to do.

Unless they had a conscience.   id has enough coin and industry influence that they can do almost anything they want.  If they choose to NOT code to D3D, that will really put the pressure on MS to keep OpenGL working smoothly on Vista.

If you still don't have enough evidence the MS is just plain evil and must be stopped before the ruin the entire computer industry more than they have already... sigh...

[swpalmer]

This also sounds like a good reason to switch to Mac ;-).

Trust me, you'll be glad you did :-)

(After all, OS X has most of the cool features that  Vista will have, but it had them several months ago.)

[Bombadil]

Unless they had a conscience.   id has enough coin and industry influence that they can do almost anything they want.  If they choose to NOT code to D3D, that will really put the pressure on MS to keep OpenGL working smoothly on Vista.

That's true.
However, taking into account that money rules the world... Well, let's see if ID are the rebels to fight the nasty M$ imperium. They've got the force, but judging from their games' "contents" it looks like they're on the dark side, too.

If you still don't have enough evidence the MS is just plain evil and must be stopped before the ruin the entire computer industry more than they have already... sigh...

Very true.

[Alan_W]

After wading through a lot of FUD and looking at the MS architecture, it seems to me that:

- Full screen games will be Ok with OpenGL 2.0 supplied as an ICD as they don't need aeroglass to be running.
- Windowed games will be stuck with OpenGL1.4 running over the successor to DirectX.

However I did see one post that pointed out that the heavy DRM stuff in Vista may have an impact in that all ICDs have to be certified by microsoft and hence cannot expose any features that could be used to subvert DRM without all DRM OS features shutting down. Not sure if this is FUD, but suspect there is an issue with freely exposing arbitary extensions and enforcing DRM.  Hopefully not a problem for games, since you normally shut down other apps anyway.

The main losers appear to be application writers, who are stuck with Vanilla OpenGL1.4 if they want to keep the aeroglass experience.  They'll probably have to move over to  DirectX & successors.

If this isn't the way of it, I've just added to the FUD

Alan

Edit: I wonder how you select the graphics manufacturer's ICD rather than the default MS 1.4OGL.  There's got to be a OS call for this, which means JOGL and LWJGL will need to expose it.

[erikd]

Well, here's another thought:
OpenGL on windows has been screwed for quite some time already. Not by MS, but by ATI and their hideous drivers (or most other non-nVidia cards' OGL drivers).
On the new windows, at least their buggy drivers can be bypassed to use DX (albeit without extensions), which is better supported anyway.

[whome]

Hopefully not a problem for games, since you normally shut down other apps anyway.

I still see this a big problem for games. I have more DX/OGL windowed games than fullscreen-shutdown-rest-of-the-world games. Freeware, shareware community has zillions of those all famous "little" games. Most are run fine in windowed mode and do it perfectly fine. I play them regularly and even keep some games running here at the office. They run in background and I play them 5-10min periods once in a while. Especially puzzle games are run this way in most of our desktops I presume.

Now in Vista, good shareware OGL games does not work as Average Joe expects to see it. Many homegrown game coders learn DX/WGF only and that's it. Soon we get even more pool of some DX experienced coders and none OGL experienced one. Once they graduate and get a job, they know nothing but DX and make games for Win+Xbox platforms only. I would call this "divide and conquer" master plan.

[princec]

They'll fix it with the GL vendors so that their ICDs will work perfectly well with Aeroglass, don't worry. Nothing's going to stop vendors shipping GL drivers for games that use GL or the vendors will find that their cards won't sell as well as their competitors. Therefore OEMs system builders will ship their machines with GL drivers as otherwise their machines will appear inferior. And therfore Microsoft will fix the issue because otherwise it makes Vista look inferior. It's not rocket science! Stop worrying already!

Cas

[DD.Jarod]

I read in the slahsdot comments about this topic, that the reason why aeroglas must be shut down for true openGL is the GPU.
Because it is not possible to run openGL and DX on a GPU on the same time. Everytime a command from the an other API should be executed, the GPU must be flushed. Aeroglass ist pure DX, which means that with some OpenGl windowed app, there are both DX and OpenGL computations for the GPU.
For MS the options are: 1. let aeroglass be slown down by an OpenGL app or
2. wrap OpenGL.
As far as I understand it, fullscreenapps won't be touched by this, the vendor spezific drivers will work here with true OpenGL. If you want true OpenGL with windowed apps or with a multidesktop system (I love my second TFT, chatting on it while playing something on the first one in fullscreen is great : ) you must disable aeroglass, or it will be disable automaticly if some real OpenGL driver is loaded (I think you must do it yourself).

I am not sure how much of this is a fact or FUD, I read it last night on different places in the web.

[Orangy Tang]

I read in the slahsdot comments about this topic, that the reason why aeroglas must be shut down for true openGL is the GPU.
Because it is not possible to run openGL and DX on a GPU on the same time.

You think the GPU knows about high level APIs like DX and OpenGL? Regardless of the API it'll end up as vendor-dependant microcode anyway. At worst drivers will have to be rewritten to cope with multiple rendering contexts at the same time (which should be largely present already).

I seem to remember some very similar FUD around the XP pre-release hype (no OpenGL at all, only software rendering at best) which amounted to practically nothing.