 | | | Subject: Re: Thoughts on the Gabe Newell 's Mac comments. | Subject: Re: Thoughts on the Gabe Newell 's Mac comments. 2007-10-05 - By Phill Djonov
Back
> Actually, you can't. E.g. DX10 is Vista-only.
True. But downloading a new graphics driver can still enable old DX9
capabilities
that weren't previously available, or expose GL extensions that hadn't been
supported
before (and my understanding is that the DX10 equivalent GL extensions are
available
on XP and even 2K - I haven't tested this myself, but I see them supported
on Linux so
I don't really doubt it).
DX10 may be Vista only, but DX9 is far from unsupported, and will remain so
for a long
time to come (if not directly by MS then at least on the hardware vendor
side of things).
> That needs to be back-ported so that devs can actually
> use it, or else we still have to maintain multiple code
> paths, with the end result being that improvements don't get
> adopted.
Very much in agreement here. I don't have time to write and test a code path
for every
possible combination of extensions. Not porting new GL extensions back to
older systems
(obviously within reason, I don't expect geometry programs on a Radeon 7x00)
makes me
want to ignore the new stuff (at least until it's become old) as I'd be
doing a lot of work for
a very small portion of my audience. There's a reason the GeForce2 drivers
support
ARB_vertex_program...
> If OpenGL wasn't tied to OS updates, we could have just told the
> 10.3 users to run Software Update and the next driver release
> would have fixed it.
Yeah...
Phill
> Actually, you can't. E.g. DX10 is Vista-only.<br><br>True. But
downloading a new graphics driver can still enable old DX9 capabilities<br>that
weren't previously available, or expose GL extensions that hadn't been
supported
<br>before (and my understanding is that the DX10 equivalent GL extensions are
available<br>on XP and even 2K - I haven't tested this myself, but I see
them supported on Linux so<br>I don't really doubt it).<br><br>
DX10 may be Vista only, but DX9 is far from unsupported, and will remain so for
a long<br>time to come (if not directly by MS then at least on the hardware
vendor side of things).<br><br>> That needs to be back-ported so that devs
can actually
<br>> use it, or else we still have to maintain multiple code<br>> paths,
with the end result being that improvements don't get<br>> adopted.<br>
<br>Very much in agreement here. I don't have time to write and test a code
path for every
<br>possible combination of extensions. Not porting new GL extensions back to
older systems<br>(obviously within reason, I don't expect geometry programs
on a Radeon 7x00) makes me<br>want to ignore the new stuff (at least until it&
#39;s become old) as I'd be doing a lot of work for
<br>a very small portion of my audience. There's a reason the GeForce2
drivers support<br>ARB_vertex_program...<br><br>> If OpenGL wasn't tied
to OS updates, we could have just told the<br>> 10.3 users to run Software
Update and the next driver release
<br>> would have fixed it.<br><br><span style="font-style: italic;"></span
>Yeah...<br><br>Phill<br>
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