DX10, OpenGL2

[akashra]

Not so directly WC related, but might be interesting to some people - especially since everyone wants to see an eyecandied up WC game.

I certainly don't have anywhere near the experience to even begin to look at this kind of stuff, but perhaps we might see it in VegaStrike if Daniel gets a chance to look at it once the APIs are released.

John Carmack goes on about DX10 vs OpenGL2

A snippet:

We are rapidly approaching a real golden age for graphics programming. Currently, cards and API's are a complex mess of hundreds of states and function calls, but the next two years will see the addition of the final primitive functionality needed to allow arbitrarily complex operations with graceful performance degradation.

At that point, a higher level graphics API will finally make good sense. There is debate over exactly what it is going to look like, but the model will be like C. Just like any CPU can compile any C program (with various levels of efficiency), any graphics card past this point will be able to run any shader. Some hardware vendors are a bit concerned about this, because bullet point features that you have that the other guy doesn't are a major marketing feature, but the direction is a technical inevitability. They will just have to compete on price and performance. Oh, darn.

It's a Turing machine point. Even if OpenGL 2.0 and DX10 don't adopt the same shader description language, they will be functionally equivalent, and could be automatically translated.

There is lots of other goop like texture specification and context management that will still be different between API, but the core day-to-day work of a graphics programmer will be basically above the disputes.

So yeh We'll see. Could be interesting. Daniel?