digger wrote on 2022-02-24, 16:06:
leileilol wrote on 2022-02-22, 23:40:
MiniGL's more of 3dfx's stopgap idea really. GLQuake was made on proper OpenGL hardware (Intergraphs) on NT at the time. Carmack had big Trinity (id Tech 3's early codename) plans set later that year with intent for requiring full GL spec compliance (Q3TEST flushing MiniGL for good 2 years later) so I don't think holding ICD progress back was in his best interest...
But would a well-standardized game-oriented subset of OpenGL, in the same vein as OpenGL ES as Azarien mentioned, really have held back ICD progress? It would have given OpenGL (being fully downwards compatible) a faster head start over Direct3D, which ultimately would have benefited OpenGL w.r.t adoption by the game industry. Aside from that, I don't see how that would have impeded OpenGL in the professional (non-game) 3D market.
There was Glide though, which itself is based on OpenGL. Quake wasn't written with any concept of miniGL (afaik), it's only because Quake didn't use Glide and 3dfx wanted to be able to support it to sell more cards ,that they created a miniGL driver. Then other developers decided to use miniGL's, perhaps to mitigate the need to use Glide or any of the many API's at the time since miniGL complient software would work with not only the top dog vendor at the time without haivng to support yet another API (and native at that), but all other vendors with OpenGL support.
3dfx created Glide for exactly the reason to not have to support OpenGL in it's fullest and nor was their hardware designed to do so (multi-viewport, many display lists, more than two multi-texturing etc.. voodoo was a cut-down 3D accelerator designed to push pixels as fast as possible for only one reason..games), they were just lucky that Carmack didn't use too many (if any) exotic features of GL, and probably annoyed that he didn't use Glide directly which only would have worked on 3dfx hardware at the time (which in itself, could be one of the reasons Carmack decided not to support a single Vendors API after being burned with Rendition).
OpenGL was already in wide use outside gaming in the world so it didn't need a head start, it just wasn't targeted at Windows games. And til this day, thats all Direct3D/DirectX targets. Other than xBox and Windows, the rest of the world (excluding Apple of course) uses OpenGL/GLES/Vullkan. Is there even a AAA Windows game these days which doesn't support Vulkan/GL as well as DirectX?
As the old saying goes... we have 10 standards for <insert subject here>, this is too complex/annoying, what we need is a new standard to unify them all... and then there were 11 standards.
The last thing PC gaming needed then was yet another standard/API for developers to support. Vendors would have loved the exclusivity though.
BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-24, 16:54:spiroyster wrote on 2022-02-24, 12:48:
Jo22 wrote on 2022-02-24, 11:35:
And OpenGL wasn't released before June 1992.. The year Windows 3.1 debuted (unrelated?). How late! 😒
OpenGL was just an open industry standard of an already very mature IrisGL which only worked on SGI machines and had been doing geometric hardware acelearation for years prior.
It got onto Win3.x somehow though, not sure off the top of my head whether it came with WinG or Win32s... but with your fully pimped out Win3.x box you could run the OpenGL screensavers like pipes, which I think came from NT.
Not hardware accelerated though. OpenGL was (and still can be) implemented in software (see Mesa3D). It's just a standard which provides description of interfaces, anyone can implement an ICD as long as it's API meets the standard and hopefully behaves like the standard says it should. It doesn't have to be done using hardware, although performance is lack luster when restricted to CPU... passable for simple scenes like pipes, but obvious as scene complexity and poly-count grows.
Microsoft originally wanted to support OpenGL beyond GL1.1 natively (it was the only one used on NT for a while) and worked with SGI (apparently) on Farenheight project to evolve the industry standard 3D technology. However at some point decided they wanted full control over the de-facto 3D API to be used on Windows and instead took a Rendermorphics API (Also used in CAD) and evolved it to be able to call it Direct3D. The rest is history.
IrisVision was hardware accelerated IrisGL (and later OpenGL) in dos. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrisVision)