Open GL and windows users (esp. Vista)

After reading the stuff below on problems and progress I was wondering how many people on average use a Windows based system? I mean would there be a percentage of like 60% or more?

I ask this question simply because I use Windows XP and keep abreast of the latest DRIVERS, hardware information and Windows related issues etc. at all times.

The problem I see is that from what it says below they are working their collective bits off on OpenGL which is fine at this point in time although XP has limited support.

The point is that I am guessing we will have to STAY with XP indefinately since XP forums and the Microsoft Vista website information points to the fact that Vista directx will support OpenGL >LESS< than XP and it may even be dropped entirely!
The videocard drivers won't make any difference since they all rely heavily on DirectX in the end with Nvidia using some special CG language only, NO OpenGL in there anywhere

I kind of wonder if windows boxes are a minority then, since LL seems intent on going the OpenGL way... or are there plans to write 2 versions of SL, one for 'nix boxes and another for Windoze (or do these users just keep all the advanced features set to off)?

>> First, the bad news:
>8 snip 8<
>An additional note about rendering features - please read:
>With release 1.9.1, we have begun the process of converting the Second Life render >pipeline to use GLSL (OpenGL Shader Language). The reason for this is to >accommodate some of the changes we are planning to introduce to the graphics engine, >including the new lighting model,

>Unfortunately, during our testing process (which includes Preview) we have found that >many graphics drivers either do not fully support GLSL, or have significant performance >issues with GLSL.

>As a result, we have decided to scale back our initial introduction of GLSL support. >Instead of using GLSL for the majority of our rendering, we are initially only using GLSL >for rendering avatars and for ripple water. Previously we were using Cg (another >shader language) for these features, and a non shader fall back is still available.

>What this means:

>The new lighting model currently only supports "Sun/Moon only" and "Nearby local >lights". The "Nearby local lights" option is still a significant improvement to the "local >lights" option in 1.9.0, largely due to the fact that it has a relatively small performance >impact on most machines. The limitation of this option however is that only the six lights >nearest your avatar will be used to light the scene.
>Some subtle rendering effects that were available in Preview with shaders enabled will >not be available yet (specular highlights and some advanced fog effects).
>8 snip 8<

Huh? I'm looking at nvidia's website right now, and the latest drivers have full support for OpenGL 2.0. And GLSL is part of the 2.0 specification.

I imagine ATI's latest drivers are the same.

As for Windows Vista, the reduced OpenGL support refers to the included software-rendering OpenGL. Video card drivers actually will make a difference, because each driver has its own OpenGL implementation.

http://www.mcadonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=149&Itemid=73
"There is an ICD model which allows hardware vendors like 3Dlabs to create a full OpenGL driver with full performance and functionality, including OpenGL 2.0 support,” explains Tim Lewis, Sales and Marketing Director, 3Dlabs Europe. “Currently, the only implication of using the IHV-supplied OpenGL driver is that the Aeroglass desktop compositor will be switched off for the OpenGL application going through an OpenGL ICD. This means that the borders of the application window will be opaque instead of (potentially) transparently composited with underlying windows. If the application runs in full-screen mode, there will be no discernible difference."

And newer information:
http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/22/537624.aspx
"Windows Vista ICD's - this is a new path for 3rd party ICD's introduced for Windows Vista that will work in a way that is compatible with desktop composition. Essentially allowing direct access to the GPU for hardware accellaration, but then having the final surface that appears to be the front buffer to the application actually be a shared surface that gets composed by the DWM"

So I don't think it's an issue.

Does the statement about the aeroglass compositing mean you would need to run SL in fullscreen mode, or just that there would be an unimportant difference in the way the window border looks when it is run in windowed mode?

I like windowed mode now and would want to use windowed mode on a Vista system if I get one, when the time comes. I don't care about the window border, so long as it's not marching ants or some kind of rounded corner thing with a pulsating plasma display.

I dunno about later builds of Vista, but in builds 5270 and 5304 (I think those numbers are right), running OpenGL applications will cause Aero Glass to be shut off, Aero Basic running in-place. The screen just goes blank for a moment, then comes back. It automatically turns back on Aero Glass when you exit the windowed OpenGL app.

I suppose using a Vista ICD, it'll be seamless. OpenGL apps will run windowed on Aero Glass at full speed.

Funny, I use XP and Nvidia video cards and I have never had any problems running OpenGL games. I think you have your facts in a twist. In fact, Nvidia's OpenGL implementation is known to be superior to ATIs, which is why ATI cards have issues with SL and other OpenGL based games.

So what's the problem?

"Nvidia using some special CG language only"

iirc, CG sits on top of both DirectX and OpenGL.

And MS pulled out of the OpenGL group last year (correct me if I'm wrong) so their moves to reduce OpenGL support aren't a surprise.

It would be a tragety for MS to force all 3d apps to go directx by nerfing opengl with the aeroglass interface. OpenGL is great stuff, and it wouldn't be right for MS to seize the only usable 3d API in this way by forcing openGL not to work right on vista.

I don't think it will happen this way, we will find some way to make openGL windowed programs to work in vista, I just hope vista doesn't get everybody crying at 3d developers to make them switch to directx, or it would effectively exclude alternative operating systems from having 3d software, which is just what MS wants I imagine.

I don't think it will happen that way though, too many people have a stake in opengl to let MS get away with nerfing it like this.

I use Windows XP and to make matters worse an ATI Radeon card.It is PCI and runs the new Swat 4 very well,but with the AVs and the new format in preview it runs really bad .Hope they do have some work around

I witnessed a converstaion recently between a friend of mine and a Microsoft Evangelist.

My friend asked about the new hardware requirments for Vista, and the MS guy said that Vista offloads the graphics processing to the video card. My friend then commented on OpenGL, something to the effect of "It sounds like MS is trying to push OpenGL out in favor of DirectX".

The MSE went crazy!! He started ranting about how Microsoft wouldn't make money off of OGL, so why should they support it?

When my friend commented that the rest of the industry uses GL now, and that MS apparently only uses DirectX to make Windows incompatible with everybody else, the guy went nuts again. "The X-Box uses Direct X! And DirectX is faster than OpenGL, everybody knows that!"

Again, my friend pointed out that he's done his own tests on programs that have an OGL and D3D renderer, and seen that the results were the same, if not slightly in favor of OGL on occasion.

The guy got mad and literally stormed out... This was a Microsoft public relations person! My friend was not confrontational and never once raised his voice, but just talking about Open GL got this guy so mad that he was yelling and left in a huff... in front of like 20 students that he'd just been giving a presentation to.

It was a beautiful thing. In 5 minutes, he'd reduced a professional PR person to a raving lunatic.

Personally, I wish Microsoft would join the rest of the industry in establishing and promoting industry standards, rather than continuing to push their model of proprietary interfaces. .Net, Direct X, and Microsoft's quirky implementation of CSS are just a couple of examples... MS would rather re-invent the wheel and then try to capture the market by forcing people to use a broken wheel than go with standards that the rest of the industry uses.

AFter all, if a program ran equally well on Macs, Unix, and Windows, why would we stay with the bogged-down, bug-ridden Windows when we could use a Mac or Linux?

I'm telling you, this is an intentional act on Microsoft's part. They don't want "Open" ANYTHING.

MS wants to make their software less compatible with the rest of the world and wants to take away the consumers' control over their own computers. MS doesn't even give you development tools unless you pay a LOT of money for it.

By contrast, Apple, Linux, and Unix give the user MORE control over their comptuers. The C++ compiler and IDE comes with the OS. Industry-standard protocols and API's are built in to the OS, without the need for third party installations.

My next computer is going to be a Mac Book.

Its a real shame we have to deal with this stuff, but honestly I dont think apple is that much better. Apple plays the same games MS does except with hardware, they make things incompatible artificially in order to exclude competitors, much like the way MS uses directx to nerf 3d on alternate platforms. If you want hardware customized to a specific function chances are macs wont let you optimize your build for the type of performance you want, sure you can spend a boatload and buy apple's everything box but if you just want low latency audio you will end up having to buy that fancy 3d card(for example)

Then you have those macs which will only plug in to apple's monitors rather than just using a dvi port, unless you pay the premium for their adaptor, that isnt much better of a practice than this directx mess. Sure apple doesnt make any money form being compatible with completing technologies, but customers are often buying these things in order to use those competing things and they will stop buying if they don't work.

Companies dont seem to benefit from open standards, but customers do, it is the grand dilemma of computing, if the business world had their way everything would be a black box welded shut with a huge price premium just to have access to the tools required to develop anything at all.

Actually, openGL remains better supported in windows than it is under macOS, as anyone with a newer macintel machine can tell you, the same openGL app (such as second life) will run significantly faster when the machine is booted into winXP than when it is booted into osX itself.

There are a few reasons for that but the primary one is that due to the massive market share winXP enjoys, video card manufacturers have spent far more resources optimizing their windows drivers than they have drivers for any other OS. This is not something that is very likely to change in the near future.

As to the ability of aero glass to stay live while running an openGL app, That may have more to do with still under-developed beta stage drivers involved in the video cards, and with the unfinished nature of aero glass itself. Chances are when vista does ship live that sort of silliness will not ship with it... Though for obvious reasons, if game performance is high on your priority list, you will not be running windowed games with aero glass on anyway (As its just that many fewer polygons, and less texture memory, that will be made available to the game itself)

Hmmm, yeah, Intel iMacs use a mini-DVI connector instead of regular DVI. However, the Mac mini uses a standard DVI connector and includes a DVI-VGA adapter. The MacBook Pro, has dual link DVI and also includes the VGA adapter. The aging multi-processor G5s also have good old DVI (dual-link) and include the VGA adapter. Only the current iMac requires the premium for the mini-DVI connector -- a wallet-busting $20.00US. But it does have a spiffy built-in LCD, so that's no biggie.

Dont forget that Apple was the first to put USB in their machines, the original candy-colored iMacs. All for the sake of a standard easy-to-use connector. At that time, the pro Macs had Apple's unanimously loathed ADC for hooking up monitors, but that's years dead now.

The other connection options on current Macs are industry standard, and have been for a while: FireWire (IEEE1394), PCI (and PCI Express), AGP, digital optical audio and analog audio. Drives have been IDE forever (not that the old SCSI was non-standard), and current systems now have serial ATA.

Compared with Windows, the OS is surprisingly open (you can download the Mac OS X core, BSD Unix-based Darwin, for FREE for your PC right now) with included open standards tools like GCC, Apache, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and others, and you have a really open box to do some serious *nix work on.


You ever opened a G4 PowerMac? Tug on a little latch on the side, it hinges at the bottom and drops down level. The MB is on the DOOR, with total access. Almost zero chance of scratched knuckles when popping in a RAM upgrade, and the drives are mounted on the bottom of the case, and very easy to reach. Only the optical drives are in traditional bays. Sadly, that design was left behind on the G5s. (yeah, I know, that's not what you're talking about )

That being said, Apple's OpenGL drivers need help. It's true, my Intel iMac runs SL better when I boot it into Windows XP (via
Boot Camp). Exact same hardware, different performance. Hopefully this disparity will prompt Apple to put some more work into their OpenGL implementation.

Yeah i've owned a fair share of macs, I usually get them from a nearby school when they sell them off after they get old though. These are the classic points, omg I accused apple of being dirty competitiors, I must have never used one before, heh. I am familiar with thier roll out of usb and firewire, and the g4's little lever every person brings up in the mac hardware arguments. Look, I'm not trying to say macs are inferior in any way, just that they aren't saints when you compare them to microsoft, they also have artificial incompatibilities in them that can be seen as a tactic to stifle competition, much in the same way windows vista with aeroglass will stifle opengl and indeed 3d on every platform that uses it once all windows software is pushed into being directx and video card makers are pushed into favoring directx over opengl. But please lets not make this a mac vs pc thread and just accept that the computer industry is willing to impair compatibility in order to encourage customers to buy within any given company's favored brands. For the record I like apple's stuff and all the various things they have pioneered to move computers forward, but they remain a proprietary system that alot of competitors are locked out of.

That's not Apple's fault. It's probably because the SL client is not optimized to run on the Apple.

I've read some test results from another OpenGL based cross-platform program: a flight simulator named X-Plane. The application is developed on the Mac and ported to Windows. On the Mac, it runs faster in native OS X mode. Run on XP on the same system via Boot Camp and it's slower.

However, run on the fastest PC's, it's still faster than the fastest Macs. (That's only because Apple doesn't yet have a Mac with Intel's fastest CPU's in it).

This is a fairly high-end application. It doesn't use shaders, but it does use all 4 rendering pipelines and is both CPU and GPU intensive.

You can't judge a platform based on one application.

In related news, OpenGL runs great in Linux. Especially since nVidia provides its own drivers for it, too.

Also, I wouldn't be too worried for OpenGL support by the Big Two video card vendors. I'd be much more worried about the whole "trusted platform" gimmick and how it's supposed to be "great for us."

In either case, I plan to watch these things like a hawk. Microsoft's moves with Vista are very reminiscent of AOL's stance on the internet (it's our internet, not yours). It'll be very interesting to see, and watch from a distance on a different OS.


Which isn't to say I don't have an XP backup....

I wasn't going to go there today, but I know someone who works with set top boxes (cable boxes, DVR's, and the like).

Trusted computing is nothing but a metaphor for taking control of the computer away from the user. Essentially, it makes it harder for users to "cheat" and do things like debug a DVD player application to find the CSS keys.

TP is essential to the implementation of protected digital video playback on PC's. In theory, you could make it virtually impossible for any sort of video transcoding or re-capture, since un-protected applications (or separate protected tasks) can't snoop a protected task. Movie comapanies, tv networks, and even software companies want this because it makes it harder to pirate content.

But it also makes it harder to legally format-shift content. This meanst that when your HD-DVD's start wearing out, you won't be able to transcode them to the next new medium. Yes, you'll get to buy your favorite movies for the third, fourth, or maybe even fifth time (if you bought it on Betamax the first time)

At every corner, corporate greed is destroying the freedoms we enjoyed on our PC's and on the Internet. Our choice is being slowly taken away from us.

What makes me sick is that there's not a thing we can do about it. People will buy TP's because it'll be the only thing available. And that's just sad.

we could wean ourselves of the content that uses such protection schemes, we could demand the right to format shift and not buy software and media that prohibits it. Somehow I don't anticipate "the masses" demanding that feature enough, they seem willing to buy the same media over and over again with every new format rollout.

It just forces people to buy the same stuff over and over, as time goes by it looks as if it is not very different from the planned obsolescence of computer hardware which forces us to buy the same features again and again.

The funny thing about software, though, is that Microsoft et al are slowly losing the professional market. DirectX/Direct3D is a perfect example of this. To quote a well-sourced snip from Wikipedia, "OpenGL has always seen more use in the professional graphics market than DirectX (Microsoft even acknowledges OpenGL's advantage in this field), while DirectX is used mostly for computer games." (Article)

That's of more relevance than it would at first appear. By losing the professional market, these companies in turn sever themselves from people that can make their own tools from the ground up. I've spent the last six months to a year testing the waters with Open Source Software, and the results have left me needing virtually nothing else. But then, I do not game very much these days, nor consume much proprietary (as opposed to indie) music.


In any event, I'll be quite surprised if TP is able to remove free and/or better standards from the running. If anything, it'll further disconnect intelligent consumers from the rest of the market, losing the megacorps business, or piss off honest consumers. And that's in no one's best interest.

TP as in the trusted stuff? I sure hope that is what will happen, that the intelligence and the money will stick with the open standards and that the lock-in strategies will backfire on those who use them. I had a similar experience last year with fooling around with linux on my laptop, up until the point where that laptop had a hardware failure, which was caused more by old age than anything else I think, it had a good run. It got me into all that creative commons music as well, it has been a very fun experience. It seems you think that this TP stuff is nothing to worry about if we care about things like opengl and indy music, I just hope that the hardware to support those activities is affordable to those who aren't quite rich enough for pro equipment.

The only thing I worry over is legislative. There's a lot of pressure on Congress for a broadcast flag-esk ruling for computers. If they make it illegal to run software outside the "trusted" schema, we're all fooked.