On Tuesday, 7 January 2014 at 13:18:51 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky
wrote:
The difference might be in that DX is huge framework, and
vendors effectively write small "core" for it.
I think this is all just a misunderstanding. Adam probably just
meant that DX drivers are being updated automatically by
Microsoft while you have to download the GL drivers yourself. But
I never meant that the graphics library should expose GL-only
functionality...
With GL the balance could be the other way around, but GL
doesn't try to be all of the many facets of the multimedia in
the first place.
(and now with DirectCompute I'm not even sure what DX wants to
be actually)
Yes, and I think this is a very good point for why the reference
implementation should not be in DX. You risk ending up with all
other platforms having to implement DX components that are not in
GL (and there is a lot of them).
E.g. in GL you cannot do anything without writing your own
shaders and there is no notion of 2D-anything… Many of the GL
calls and parameters are actually also legacy calls so the REAL
OpenGL ES API that you are likely to use is quite limited and
bare bones.
Another reason I've already mentioned is to test feature
coverage/performance on multiple platforms which only OpenGL ES
enables.
Yet another reason is to allow/encourage as many as possible to
dabble with the API early on to increase the usability of it.
Which actually might be the most important aspect.
