Its funny how people get all dramatic about this. Atleast OGL 3.0 has some new things, thats always better than nothing but obviously some devs think that its not. Illogical bunch of guys...

Yes, we didn't get what we were waiting for but its not like its our RIGHT to get everything they promise form. These things aren't in our hands.

I agree with you here.

But we are the minority and many programmers will change to DirectX except they are bound to cross-platform environments.

Though I believe that this counts only to game dev coding. The CAD coders are just another story.

At the end you can work with OGL. You can use the extensions to access latest hardware. But at the other hand it is no more optimized to latest hardware, there is no object-orientation and the OpenGL support from ATI is bad though they produce and sell most of the graphic cards.
I can understand some frustration there:
http://www.tojiart.com/OpenGL/

Here are some more complaints and comments about the new OGL3:

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=760#comm

Here are the links again I already mentioned above:
http://www.tojiart.com/OpenGL/
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=504547

It looks like the majority of people is mad about the situation. Most of them want to change to DX (if they can). The author from tojiart.com wrote, that he wrapped a new interface around OpenGL and just came up with something similar that DX already offers. So he moved to DX for his projects.
Many people do it the same way.

This is very bad news because I had lots of hope in OGL especially with cross platform developing in mind.

But nevertheless: It will survive because there is no alternative if you want to create 3d real-time graphics for certain platforms.

I don't consider it as a tool but as a 3D programming language.
You've got ot reinvent the whell once again : program a 3D engine , program all the tools , and not sure you will end
with something, and during that time you won't create a game
and all necessary 3D art (that takes as much time or more) !

Hmm... some quotes I liked from gamedev.net. These quotes I don't neccessarily agree with, but they are good ones.

"This is why they say GL is for CAD. D3D is for games."

"I guess the OpenGL vs Direct3D question has finally been answered. It's Direct3D unless you need cross platform compatibility."

"Some cad guy told everyone in the thread @ OpenGL's site to calm down, and that games are small, unimportant apps.
"

"Sounds like lots of 'The sky falling' talk but I thought the sky had fallen years ago. I am using OGL/GLSL and it has everything I need. The trick is not to read the DX SDK I learned roughly OS/2 years ago not to take sides. Just use OGL for what it's good for and leave it at that."

My favorite quote.
"What's wrong with drawing a line and put a complete new api for the next version? Dx does it (too often possibly). It's not like it hurts anyone to have opengl1.dll, opengl2.dll and opengl3.dll on it's system."

And the most informative and reasonable quote,
"It's not the number of apps that matter; it's the size of the market that these apps cater to. What would you estimate is the annual revenue from this "small handful of old CAD apps" (like AutoCAD 2009, released way back in the dark days of March 2008)? This was a US$ 1 billion market in 1979; in 1997, PDM - just one facet of the PLM approach generally employed by modern CAD solutions - was a $1.1 billion market by itself.

I understand the game developer's frustration - I was just about to start learning OpenGL for the Mac, and I still will - but let's not get ridiculous. CAD is a huge industry: every architecture firm, every electrical firm, every large-scale manufacturer, the automotive industry, product design, industrial design... They are a major client of OpenGL, and their perspective is an important one.

Nor can you argue that they could just continue working against 2.1 while the rest of the world moved on to 3.0. CAD applications develop and compete aggressively, as aggressively as games albeit with a different visual emphasis, and they need to take advantage of technology advances just like everyone else.

No question, this is a disappointment, but it doesn't appear to be so much a case of deliberately "screwing developers over" as it is a case of incompetence and lack of strong vision to plot a future. I mean, I'm only a casual OpenGL observer, but that seems to have been the case ever since the Khronos Group became responsible."


That about wraps it up for me. I'm sticking to D3D10, as I imagine in two years when my game is out there will be many Vista users, that is assuming Vista gets fixed.

This is the kind of question I have never had a clear answer
What's the problem for the graphic card manufactures to support both API's ?
Does it entail also an heavy modification of the hardware itself ?

Well afaik ATI didn't drop the development of OpenGL stuff but wanted to wait for 3.0 because it initially promised incredible advances from the programmer's point of view. Unfortunately this didn't happen and so you still have this API that's been growing for like 15 years with lots of different ways to do the same thing with only little of them being a good idea in the end...

With that said it's not about the hardware (DirectX declares what new features there have to be anyway nowadays) but the driver development is the problem. I now also have the point of view that it's not like ATI or Intel having bad drivers but more NVIDIA being the only one actually actively supporting OpenGL. Well ATI started to have a bigger focus on OpenGL and so even without what was promised for version 3.0 we might see some nice new drivers coming...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Well however it is a matter of fact opengl comes alwayes later, in the graphic manufacture schedule
It is not the first case
It is evident that direct x has alwayes the priority
I am also conerned about opengl based game engines



ATI an nVidia are industrial giants
Is it really a so serious issue ?
Just wondering

Well it's not that ATI for example doesn't support OpenGL at all or something like that. It's just about some extensions for specific features you have to write for your drivers and that's obviously a pretty complicated procedure especially if you want it to be performant too...

Apart from that the desktop market has only a very small percentage of people actually really needing that and that's why this has a rather low priority (although especially for ATI I've seen quite some additional attention on this lately)...

Things might be a bit different for the professional cards like the Quadro and FireGL series but here you also can see ATIs higher interest as in June there was a new driver giving you roughly a 33% increase in OpenGL performance so on this sector there's more time spent for this (as CAD and so on are quite important apps)...

Enjoy your meal
Toast