Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

They are beginning to exist but it is very unlikely that these will have the stability that OpenGL has. They will likely be more convenient, but if you are building something today that doesn't have very high performance needs sticking to the OpenGL API is probably a good way to ensure that you won't have to migrate to something else for a very, very long time.

View on HN

> if you are building something today that doesn't have very high performance needs sticking to the OpenGL API is probably a good way to ensure that you won't have to migrate to something else for a very, very long time.

That is, in fact, precisely the wrong advice.

Vulkan runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X (via MoltenVk). Nothing else does.

OS X runs OpenGL 3.Ancient and has now dropped OpenGL. OpenGL drivers for Linux tend to be laughably worse than the Vulkan drivers.

All of the major gaming companies have basically said "We have no OpenGL jobs. We have a ton of unfilled Vulkan jobs."

If you aren't using DirectWhatever, Vulkan is going to be the only useful 3D API very shortly.

Seconding everything here. It's also worth nothing MoltenVK development was sponsored by Valve (that's how they get Dota 2 on macOS.)

OS X runs OpenGL 4.1 and is still available even if deprecated. If you are considering MoltenVK as a viable option then perhaps Zink over MoltenVK would work in the future.

Note that most of the newer OpenGL features are largely about sending stuff faster to the GPU, not enabling new GPU features - you can do a lot of stuff with OpenGL 4.1. IMO if you are struggling for CPU performance with OpenGL then you might be better moving to Vulkan. But if this isn't your bottleneck then there isn't a reason to not stick with OpenGL.

If OpenGL drivers on Linux are "laughably worse" (though in practice i haven't much of a difference) then the solution is to improve those drivers. It'll be better for all the thousands of existing applications too.

> OS X runs OpenGL 4.1 and is still available even if deprecated.

You are correct. I misspoke. I meant to say 4.Ancient since 4.1 is 10 years old now.

> Note that most of the newer OpenGL features are largely about sending stuff faster to the GPU, not enabling new GPU features

For shaders, I certainly find that not true. There are a lot of shader features that got added over 10 years.

And, I believe things even as important as Uniform Buffer Objects are later than 4.1.

OpenGL 4.1 just ... isn't good in this day and age.

> If OpenGL drivers on Linux are "laughably worse" (though in practice i haven't much of a difference) then the solution is to improve those drivers.

I totally disagree. There simply aren't enough people in the Linux ecosystem to maintain those drivers and Vulkan drivers. I'd rather those developers all work on the newer and better API.

Vulkan runs on Windows , only runs outside sandbox model and doesn't support RDP sessions, because ICD OpenGL driver model isn't supported in such scenarios.

ICD OpenGL drivers are also not supported on Windows ARM variants.

Microsoft is driving the effort of OpenGL and related technology on top of DirectX instead.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...

Also so far there is no Vulkan on PlayStation, and while Switch does support Vulkan/OpenGL 4.5, most titles are either using middleware like Unity (ca 50% of Switch titles) or NVN.

I'm pretty sure I ran vulkan apps via RDP and they worked fine. I think it was also on GTX 960.

I think the person you responded to was comparing OpenGL to Vulkan middleware wrappers from the perspective of API usage. From that angle, whether or not OpenGL drivers are provided at all is completely irrelevant. The API itself will presumably remain available, implemented under the hood via Zink (or similar) on top of Vulkan (or DirectX, or Metal, etc). Such an arrangement is likely to be more stable than middleware that can change overnight at the whims of it's developers.

As verbose as Vulkan may be, it's a well-designed vanilla C API. Some of the future helper libraries may also be in vanilla C, in which case it's not difficult to version and ensure relative stability.

The other good option that's likely to be supported for a long time is WebGPU.

As long as Vulkan itself stays stable, who cares, just pin the version of the wrapper?

What "stability that OpenGL has"?

The OpenGL API is standardized and has multiple implementations so it isn't susceptible to some layer/library developer waking up one morning and deciding to break the API to make it "cleaner" or "easier" or whatever.

Hell, even though Khronos tried to do exactly that with the core/compatibility schism, pretty much all existing implementations decided breaking people's code is a stupid move and mostly ignored it (Apple being an exception but Apple hates developers[0] and their OpenGL implementation was always awful - even then, Apple's implementation is still an implementation of a stable API).

In practice it means that your currently working code will remain working in the future and there are good chances that you'll be able to port it in other places with either official or unofficial implementations.

[0] OK, OK, i know, Apple doesn't "hate" developers, they just do not care about them at all and they'd happily break things like a hippo dancing in a glassware shop if they believe that would make their own developers feel better.

Multiple implementations suck because implementors rarely aim for full compliance, and now you have to have as many code paths as there are implementations to account for the differences between them. Best to have a single implementation that everybody agrees on -- like the winner of the graphics API wars, Direct3D.

> Best to have a single implementation that everybody agrees on -- like the winner of the graphics API wars, Direct3D.

Ah yes, D3D, well known for its broad cross platform support! In all seriousness, would a Linux D3D driver even be legal? I have to assume that major legal or technical barriers exist, otherwise why wouldn't a GPU vendor have developed one at some point?

D3D drivers for Linux exist but it's through a compatibility layer. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

I don't think a compatibility layer implemented in software is the same as a driver implemented by the vendor that interacts directly with the hardware.

Mesa actually does support D3D9 natively for AMD (and, sort of, Intel) GPUs via the Gallium Nine project, and there is a branch of Wine that uses it.

But these days that's mostly superseded by DXVK (which implements D3D9 through 11 over Vulkan, kind of like Zink in the OP) and VKD3D (D3D12 over Vulkan).

I don't know what you are talking about. Direct3D is Windows only. Metal is iOS and Mac only. Vulkan is in theory supported on all platforms but UWP doesn't allow it and Mac requires a compatibility wrapper.

If anything the graphics API war is still going on.

Vulkan is only supported on the Switch, in what concerns game consoles.

And even there one can choose GL 4.5 and NVN as well.

Most native titles end up going with NVN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com