More apitest related links and notes

More apitest related links:

OpenGL Stop Breaking my Heart

apitest results on AMD comparing various OpenGL and D3D11 approaches

Some important things about apitest and the results worth pointing out:

1. apitest results should not be compared vendor vs. vendor.

The test was not originally designed to be used in this way. Accurate benchmarking is surprisingly hard, and it's possible apitest's results are flawed or misleading in some way when compared vendor vs. vendor.

2. In many cases AMD's GL driver is within the same ballpark, or faster, compared to their D3D11 driver.

3. The relative sorted order of techniques is approximately the same on both vendors. 

This is good, because apps tend to use the slowest techniques and the authors are encouraging developers to use the faster approaches.

4. We're taking possible performance gains of 15x-20x, on drivers from both vendors.

5x-10x would be fantastic, 15x+ is amazing. 

Now all that's needed are drivers from all vendors that not only support these techniques, but handle them reliably and with reasonably consistent performance.

State of GL 4.x revealed via "apitest" benchmark

This excellent GL 4.x micro-benchmark that has been making waves recently is really interesting. Now that it's on Phoronix it's about as mainstream as it's going to get: NVIDIA Slaughters AMD Catalyst On Linux In OpenGL 4.x Micro-Benchmarks

At first glance the results sound great for NV: "The AMD Catalyst driver gets absolutely annihilated for these GL4 micro-benchmarks". But unfortunately it's bad news for everyone working in GL because it clearly demonstrates just how fractured and inconsistent the GL driver landscape actually is when the rubber hits the road.

Article: "DirectX Creator Says Apple’s Metal Heralds the End of OpenGL"

Links:

Alex. St John: "Direct3D, OpenGL, Metal, Full Circle"
Time: "DirectX Creator Says Apple’s Metal Heralds the End of OpenGL"

According to St. John: "Nearly twenty years later OpenGL still sucks for games, OpenGL drivers are STILL consistently broken across devices, OpenGL is still driven by CAD applications".

BTW - I'm no longer at Valve or working on vogl. And no, I'm not being paid by, nor do I know anyone still at Apple, lol.

How I learned to stop worrying and love OpenGL

Good summary of the OpenGL developer debate with links:

http://www.dayonepatch.com/index.php?/topic/107633-a-pretty-huge-debate-about-opengl-has-erupted-in-the-dev-community-involving-devs-from-valve-epic-firaxis-and-amd/

"This is quite technical, but I think this is very interesting considering what Valve is staking on OpenGL in regard to its future plans:

1. The debate started when Rich Geldreich from Valve (who is working on Vogl, Valve's OpenGL debugger) posted an entry on his blog called Things That Drive Me Nuts About OpenGL.  He also made a couple of Twitter posts here and here.

2. In response, Timothy Lottes, a senior rendering programmer at Epic who developed FXAA and TXAA while at Nvidia, posted this response on his personal blog.

3. Rick Geldreich the posted The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality on his blog.  His Twitter post on this entry features quite a few responses.

4. Joshua Barczak, Firaxis's lead graphics engineer for the Civilization, agrees with Geldreich and posted this blog entry OpenGL Is Broken.

5. Epic's Timothy Lottes (as naturally expected) posted this response.

6. This caused AMD's OpenGL developer to post an angry tweet and another one from a former Nvidia developer who now works at Valve.

7.  Michael Marks, the tech director from Aspyr, shared his thoughts.  He also posted OpenGL Stop Breaking My Heart and The Impact of Apple's Limited OpenGL Support On Gaming.

8.  A Unity developer chimed in with Rant About Rants About OpenGL.

9.  Barczak posted a follow-up regarding OpenGL driver quality.

10.  Lastly, and somewhat unrelated, a Naughty Dog dev said LOL DX12 LOL."

"OpenGL Is Broken"

Good writeup by Joshua Barczak:
http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=154

Apple Metal API

Apple (a Khronos Group "promoter" member) "is introducing a new 3D API called Metal, which takes the place of OpenGL, allowing games to get ’10x’ faster draw rates":

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Miscellaneous/Conceptual/MTLProgGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8116/some-thoughts-on-apples-metal-api

So now we have DX12, Mantle, and now Metal..