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Comment by NEDM64 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but you're being naive.

Rarely there are standards bodies that aren't controlled by companies and their interests.

If they allowed OpenGL to flourish, it would ultimately be controlled by either Nvidia, ATI, PowerVR or someone else in the interest group to suit their hardware. Somebody has to pay the engineers.

Look at W3C, if is practically controlled by Google, and they only do what suits their needs, the way they want.

Look at Bluetooth, Apple is controlling the thing, and now they are releasing a newer version that's selfishly taylored for Apple to sell expensive headphones probably with patented methods, which they will use to protect themselves in court in case someone goes on a patent war against them.

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You are talking about something else.

> If they allowed OpenGL to flourish, it would ultimately be controlled by either Nvidia, ATI, PowerVR or someone else in the interest group to suit their hardware.

As opposed to DirectX, which is not implementable on other systems without large reverse-engineering efforts, because the technology depends on proprietary and encumbered middle-ware. Does a former specification for DirectX even exist (aside the documentation for Microsoft's implementation of the API)? Or it is one and the same, is it not? Where is the DirectX equivalent of MESA?

W3C, Bluetooth etc. have nothing to do with PC gaming. Why are you bringing this up? But since you mentioned W3C, what would you prefer - proprietary technology controlled by a single entity, such as Adobe Flash, or an open standard, such as HTML5?

An open platform allows free choice of technologies to use it with. A closed platform restricts those choices. A monopoly in control of a closed platform has even more freedom to restrict freedom of choice, and push forward with platform lock-in.

"An open platform allows free choice of technologies to use it with."

Which are also made by companies just like Microsoft.

It's really hard to combine gaming enthusiasm (with the exception of retro gaming) with love of the 'free choice' and not be delusional.

The main reason: the GPU. There is very little value in having an open specification, if the implementation sucks. And the complexity of the graphics stack is such that nobody but huge monoliths that can focus lots of paid personnel to implement the GPU, implement the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers...

It's grueling, backbraking work to make a complete hardware based graphics stack.

Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options.

We can argue what do we mean by "gaming" of course. Solitaire, chess, tuxracer - yeah, I agree, free is very doable.

GTA v, Witcher 3 ( triple aaa titles) - you need a BigOrg to mind your graphics stack, of which there are only handfull on earth, of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others (if we limit discussion to games).

> Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options.

Mesa has hardware accelerated implementation of OpenGL. You don't need "big org" to do it. But it surely helps if they put resources into that work.

> of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others (

It's worse than many others because their goal is not to improve the graphics stack, but to lock everyone into using MS systems.

>> Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options. >Mesa has hardware accelerated implementation of OpenGL. You don't need "big org" to do it. But it surely helps if they put resources into that work.

The hardware specific driver is the more laborious thing to get correct. Well, OpenGL as well, but the driver is what I was after, not the specific API on top of it, and if the driver is buggy the OpenGL implementation on top can only try to patch things only so much.

>> of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others ( > It's worse than many others because their goal is not to improve the graphics stack, but to lock everyone into using MS systems.

I don't think there is any way MS can lock everyone into using their system.

I would claim MS has driven innovation in hardware accelerated realtime graphics by providing a stable and tested API at a time when OpenGL implementations were buggy and broken due to the messy work Khronos did with the standard and the way the implementations were done.

> I would claim MS has driven innovation

Not really, especially recently. They were pretty slow (because OpenGL was even slower to evolve), and only woke up when AMD voiced their interest to open up Mantle (which became Vulkan). So AMD were the main innovator in the recent times, when graphics APIs are concerned.

Sorry, you are talking about something else too.

My comment was about monopolies and how they creep into other fields through lock-in and proprietary technology which restrict choice. You have warped my comment into one advocating for a fully open platform stack, a strawman. At this point, why not also argue that the games are open source too? I mean, that would be nice, but it wasn't what I was saying.

> Which are also made by companies just like Microsoft.

And that's fine, as long as it doesn't come with strings attached such as "This technology shall only run on Microsoft Windows" or "All users of this technology, even open-source projects, must pay royalty fees".

Sorry, - strawman was not intended. As a person with some experience in the graphics industry, the way I see it: if one uses hardware accelerated real time graphics capability, one is always effectively locking some parts of the rendering codebase in to some specific hardware platform. No matter what the API used to program the platform, you are effectively locked in to very few vendors. There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

> There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

How are they a good player, if they could back Vulkan instead of pushing lock-in DX12, but they didn't? It's clearly bad.

If they would actively block good Vulkan implementations on Windows - yes, that would be a dick move. Is that the situation, though?

They actively block it on Xbox.

Ok, fair enough. Although I don't see the benefit of opening multiple graphics API:s on a closed hardware platform that is the Xbox console.

That's what "closed" here means :) I.e. they block competition.

> The main reason: the GPU. There is very little value in having an open specification, if the implementation sucks

I don't know, maybe we should try. Currently the implementations suck, because there's no specification, not the other way around.

> And the complexity of the graphics stack is such that nobody but huge monoliths that can focus lots of paid personnel to implement the GPU, implement the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers...

Substitute GPU / graphics stack with general purpose OS. Sounds plausible, yet there are lots of people working on that huge monolith for free and getting paid.

MS actively has been trying to negated PC gaming to get consumer to XBox (closed all MS Game Studios, stopped all franchises like Age ofvEmpire and FlightSimulator series (everyone is angry about the Farmville style cheap F2P knockoffs), closed MS Windows Live, stopped DirectXdotNet and XNA, changed completely the direction of DirectX with DX10 and yet again with DX12, and the infamous privacy issues aka telemetry that half of the gamers will never upgrade to Win10 including myself). macOS, SteamOS/Linux, PS4 and WiiU/NX will get a lot more gamers - and that will continue until MS fires its third CEO sooner than later. Win10 UniversalRuntime/Store games are implemented in such a bad way it's just laughable and XBoxOne has little marketshare compared to PS4. And Win32 game market share is still huge, also thank to Steam (Valve is very much against Win10!), compared to the WinStore which has little to offer and compared to Android and iOS the WinStore on WinPhone smells and feels like it is already and legacy platform.

As far as I know, all the antiprivacy bullshit was introduced in Win7 too

So, you think it's better not to have open standards and let lock-in and monopolies run rampant? Hard, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

I agree with you, but I also think asking leading question sucks. Just say what you mean!

Open Standards are the MOST CRITICAL thing we can be considering right now. If we can agree on standards that can adapt to other standards, using AI most likely, then we can get on with being able to trust each other again.

In order to trust each other, we have to be honest about our intent. Personally, I think the use case of games on insecure hardware is probably fine. To a point.

It was a rhetorical question :) I don't think anyone in their mind would say that we should pursue lock-in rather than open standards. Except crooked monopolists.

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