Techsoft 3D Comments onOpenGL in Vista

Ron Fritz of Techsoft 3D (the HOOPS people) provided me this statement on the future of OpenGL:

It's hard to comment specifically on the reports about [Vista-related] performance hits with CAD applications without much more detail. For instance, with most reports it's not clear whether these are graphics issues or whether they relate to certain CAD operations.

I can say that our experience with graphics testing on Vista is that the quality of the video card drivers can vary greatly. With some, we see performance that is quite good, but with others it's unacceptably bad when going through OpenGL. We expect this to settle out rather quickly as the next generation of graphics cards & drivers are released, but this variation will continue to be the reality for anyone with "pre-Vista" graphics cards.

With that said, we do expect [Microsoft's proprietary replacement for OpenGL] Direct3D to be the preferred option on the Windows platform going forward. This will be due mainly to the fact that the card vendors will focus more on their D3D drivers for two reasons:

* First, D3D needs to be fast just to run the operating system/UI.
* Second, D3D is by far the most common approach to graphics for games, and given the high volumes in that market the card vendors will pay more attention to that approach.

From the card vendor's view, OpenGL is used in a handful of games and of course very heavily in our CAD/CAM/CAE industry but our volumes pale in comparison to the games market. In summary, the D3D approach will get more attention from the hardware vendors than the OpenGL approach so we'd expect that to be more robust.

Note, though, that OpenGL will remain important. On any pre-Vista Windows system OpenGL will be the high-performance approach for any OpenGL-based application. I think the world can expect the current hardware & Windows XP systems to stay in use for awhile. OpenGL will also be the best (only) approach for hardware acceleration for any platform other than Windows.

Comments

[George Tylinski]

Considering that Vista has been YEARS in the making, to discover at LAUNCH DATE that OpenGL video boards (and therefore nearly all CAD users) are not invited is beyond appalling. Vista ready my a**.

The rosiest scenario would be that, what, a year from now the graphics driver software and CAD software sych up with an OGL revision that works ALMOST as well on Vista as XP.

By the way, if Vista is simply abandoning the tech users to satisfy gamers, consider this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/17/gameplay-only-gets-worse-with-vista/

[ralphg]

George:

It is remarkable. But, the CTO of a CAD company tells me that they are still trying to figure out WHY their CAD software runs more slowly under Vista.

This could be another tough transition, like it was from speedy DOS to slow Windows.

[Tommi P. Laiho]

What I think now is that CAD software producers should stay in Open GL because its open system and good. They should start to offer they programs to Linux based system and forget Windows. I hope that the aim to destroy Open GL from Microsoft was their last mistake which lead the world to shift to Linux from Windows.