pouët.net

smash: you have a proof of what you say? :) then i am interrested.

nystep: only proof from experience :)

ok, maybe we should do a benchmark then to compare and make ideas clear..

Opengl is used in the commercial world in medicine(and medicine research), 3-D visualization application for the scientific community for research on data stored on huge supercomputers and used in 3-D commercial applications in conjuction with the US Government such as NASA and NOAA...so i hardly think that OpenGL is used merely for just some random test application that you speak of and is clearly used for time critical and important matters without relying on video games for commercial and developer support.

I guess it's time to read.

Nowhere did I imply that OpenGL isn't thoroughly used, I was merely stating that it's approach to being cross-platform/portable has rather limited use. It's view on portability is based on a kind of utopia and I'm sure many (critical) scientific applications have different codepaths for different hardware just like any other (embedded) software out there in the world.

Prime example: those extensions. Though hopefully that's just something limited to the scope of consumer PCs and videogames..

As you may know... OpenGL 3.1 spec was released yesterday or something, and it's corresponding GLSL 1.40.

I gave a quick look over the specs and it seems they did little more than removing the features marked as deprecated in 3.0 (and glsl 1.30). What important changes were made other than the deprecation? It can't have much more newer features since the last version was presented less than 1 year ago.

It finally got uniform buffer objects so you can share blocks of uniforms between shaders, making GLSL possible to use for anything bigger than toy applications for the first time. You still have to link vertex and fragment shaders together and can't just mix and match - completely useless misfeature.

Other than that, they standardized a few extensions as usual.

Altogether a good but boring update.

FYI: The OpenGL 3.1 spec is out since yesterday. This time khronos deprecated most of the old stuff. I haven't checked it in detail though.

http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/glspec31.20090324.pdf

Cheers,
Nils

Thanks for repeating.

I did not have the courage to read the 7 pages to see if the question was already asked, so please accept my appologies in advance if it was the case.

If you wanted to do a small 3d application, like a casual game, something that would run on modest hardware (possibly with some simple shaders), targetting Windows, Mac and Linux, would you use OpenGL on the three platform, or would you bother using OpenGL (or something else ?) on Linux and Mac, and D3D on Windows ?

there's nothing wrong with OpenGL other than people being too professional and used to Direct3D.

Old stuff is still there through ARB afaik. jsyk.

But it may run trhough software.

Dbug: maybe http://www.frontendapi.com/

Dbug, let me rephrase your question:

"if you wanted to do something simple, would like to learn two different APIs and write two different applications to do the same thing, or just one?"