Rich Geldreich states these are his personal thoughts after working with OpenGL, Rich is currently working at Valve on 'Vogl' an open source OpenGL debugger. He makes some interesting points.

Looks like he is laying down some cold and harsh truths about OpenGL, maybe it's time to get it sorted? I've seen a lot of indie developers claim about how much more difficult OpenGL is to use over Directx, so he is clearly not alone.

QuoteMantle and D3D12 are going to thoroughly leave GL behind (again!) on the performance and developer "mindshare" axes very soon.

I am not entirely sure I agree on the mind-share bit for Mantle, since I haven't seen that many developers claim they will support it. Performance wise they both could beat OpenGL though, that's pretty obvious.

For those of you who will jump on me for that above statement and bring up the talks about unlocking "15x more performance with OpenGL" that Nvidia, AMD and Intel did recently, well Rich notes this as well:

QuoteThey will not bother to re-write their entire rendering pipeline to use super-aggressive batching, etc. like the GL community has been recently recommending to get perf up. GL will be treated like a second-class citizen and porting target until the API is modernized and greatly simplified.

What a sad state we are in right now. With Valve heavily moving into the Linux & OpenGL space maybe they can help with all of this, who knows.

One thing to really agree on is this:

QuoteOne of the touted advantages of GL is its support for extensions. I argue that extensions actually harm the API overall, not help it.

How many times have we seen in the past that one graphics card driver support x extension, but another does not? It causes all kinds of issues, a standard API to build against is what developers like, not all manner of possible combinations that may or may not exist on certain drivers.

Here is something else we can agree on:

QuoteDrivers should not crash the GPU or CPU, or lock up when called in undefined ways via the API
Should be obvious by now. Please hire real testers and bang on your drivers!
Better yet: Structure the API to minimize the # of undefined or unsafe patterns that are even possible to express via the API.

This has happened to me too many times. I am sure we are all no stranger to hard-locks when playing games, be honest I am sure it has happened to everyone.

Reading the long blog post certainly brings some issues to light about OpenGL and why I constantly see developers getting annoyed by it.

Check out the full developer-orientated blog post here. I sure hope the Khronos Group take a note of this blog post and at-least think about the points raised in it as they are important to all of us.

What are your thoughts on it?

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valves-rich-geldreich-notes-some-problems-with-opengl-directx-12-will-leave-it-in-the-dust.3676

Weird coming from him as he points out that Valve is heavily moving towards Linux and OpenGL.
He sounds a bit stressed though.

So, he's saying that Steam Machines are additionally screwed?

He was probably having a bad day... and decided to vent.

But OpenGL is so much better because!
Wow, that's quite a rant with many, many deep design faults in OpenGL and most of the comments seem to agree with it. This doesn't really affect gaming but shows that not everything that is not MS is better by default. Or something that is "open" is automatically better.

Extensions are great though when you have a fixed platform and you want to make your own modifications, so for example..., a console is it?

But consoles don't use OpenGL.

They don't? or is that sarcasm?

Don't. There was PSGL but it wasn't used because of libgcm.

tbh the name ROFL

Rich = being rich having money (I know its probably Richard but still)

and even better his surname Geldreich = is German and means MoneyRich or MoneyEmpire

So he is double rich because of all the money he has.

Back to topic:

but cant people just fix openGL?