The “Break it Down” Blog

It looks like the OpenGL 3.0 spec has finally been released by the Khronos™ Group and so far the community response has been: “You can shove that right back up your ass, we are going to DirectX”.

Ouch…

Shortly after the announcement game development forums were a-buzz with negative reactions to the spec essentially saying that it was nothing more than OpenGL 2.2, not 3.0, as it was missing all of the major redesign that had been promised during an entire year of silence.

Eddy Luten from the OpenGL.org forums summed up the release to be:

• API support for the new texture lookup, texture format, and integer and unsigned integer capabilities of the OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 specification (GL EXT gpu shader4).
  
• Conditional rendering (GL NV conditional render).
  
• Fine control over mapping buffer subranges into client space and flushing modified data.
  
• Floating-point color and depth internal formats for textures and renderbuffers (GL ARB color buffer float, GL NV depth buffer float, 455 N.2. DEPRECATION MODEL 456 GL ARB texture float, GL EXT packed float, and GL EXT texture shared exponent).
  
• Framebuffer objects (GL EXT framebuffer object).
  
• Half-float (16-bit) vertex array and pixel data formats
  (GL NV half float and GL ARB half float pixel).
  
• Multisample stretch blit functionality (GL EXT framebuffer multisample and GL EXT framebuffer blit).
  
• Non-normalized integer color internal formats for textures and renderbuffers (GL EXT texture integer).
  
• One- and two-dimensional layered texture targets
  (GL EXT texture array).
  
• Packed depth/stencil internal formats for combined depth+stencil textures and renderbuffers (GL EXT packed depth stencil).
  
• Per-color-attachment blend enables and color writemasks
  (GL EXT draw buffers2).
  
• RGTC specific internal compressed formats (GL EXT texture compression rgtc).
  
• Single- and double-channel (R and RG) internal formats for textures and renderbuffers.
  
• Transform feedback (GL EXT transform feedback).
  
• Vertex array objects (GL APPLE vertex array object).
  
• sRGB framebuffer mode (GL EXT framebuffer sRGB)
• Deprecation of older features.

Rumors so far have it that the reason the spec was held back from many changes so aggressively was to maintain compatability with all the existing CAD apps out there.

As many users pointed out, then why not do a 2.2 release, or just let the existing CAD apps continue to grow in the OpenGL 2.1 space while all new OpenGL-based development would take place against the 3.0 spec?

There didn’t seem to be a clear answer to that from the OpenGL governing body, but overall sentiment seems to be lack-luster at best and pissed-off-switching-to-DirectX-10 at worst.

This likely spells further disaster for PC gaming on Linux, not that it was actually going anywhere anyway.

Thanks Slashdot!