[Info-vax] Interesting View of Graphics Driver Futures

[Neil Rieck]

On Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 12:20:19 AM UTC-4, lawren... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, May 6, 2016 at 11:42:59 PM UTC+12, Neil Rieck wrote:
> > Now Microsoft has dominated this technology ever since "SIGGRAPH 1992" but
> > their copyrights and their lawyers have forced other OSs to push OpenGL which
> > has never be able to keep up (feature-wise).
> 
> DirectX is Windows-specific, OpenGL is cross-platform. That’s how it’s always been. Android uses OpenGL. That alone would make it the most popular real-time 3D API in the world.
> 
> > Most people outside of gaming have ignored the efforts of companies like
> > Valve (which was started by an ex-Microsoft employee) to look for
> > alternatives until now.
> 
> Gabe Newell did it after he found out how much DirectX performance had fallen behind OpenGL. Microsoft may have been stung out of its complacency by that for a while, but I suspect it has too much on its plate right now to keep up for the long haul.
> 
> By the way, modern GUIs make heavy use of OpenGL behind the scenes. This even applies to those sporting the oh-so-trendy 2D “flat” look at the moment.

It might be more accurate to say that DirectX is Microsoft specific because it is also the "X" of XBOX, but I digress. 

OpenGL is a very popular API which has showed promise but has never kept up to DirectX (and this has more to do with the amount of money that Micro$soft has thrown at DirectX). But anyone who has watched Microsoft for any length of time has seen this before: they have too many irons in the fire which leaves an opening for a competitor or two.

You mentioned Gabe Newell (of Valve/Steam fame) but many people reading this probably do not know that he used to be a Microsoft employee who thought that Microsoft had not done enough with gaming (the dot-net API is one place where MS took graphics further away from the metal) so he went his own way. His estimated fortune is less than Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Paul Allen but is still over one billion making him another Microsoft employee who has done well. The failure of Steam's GameCube controller is proof that Newell doesn't have the golden touch (this claim could be made for Microsoft as well although the recently announced improvements to Xbox-One seem intriguing; but will it be able to keep up with announced improvements to Sony's PS4 ?)

Meanwhile, the other elephant in the room is AMD/ATI who is working on a graphics technology called Vulkan which is reported to be faster than anything else but (like OpenGL) also happens to be cross-platform. 

http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/vulkan#

Let's see who will be the leaders in this next shakeout

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.