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GDC - NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains

Nzyme32

Member
Presentation at the link, can't watch it on mobile right now

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/opengl-gdc2014/

If you want to get a developer’s attention, all you need to do is start dropping whole numbers.

Offer something that’s not 1.2 times better — but two or three times better — you know you’ve got them.

That’s the good news we teamed up with AMD and Intel to deliver at this week’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

GDCLogoAMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and our own Cass Everitt and John McDonald appeared on the same panel to explain the high-level concepts available in today’s OpenGL implementations that reduce driver overhead by up to 10x or more.

With OpenGL, an open, vendor-neutral standard, developers can get significantly better performance – up to 1.3 times. But with a little tuning, they can get 7 to 15 times more performance.

That’s a figure that will make any developer sit up and listen.

Better still: the techniques presented apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. And they brought demos, showing what these improvements mean on real world systems.

That’s because OpenGL can cut through the driver overhead that has been a frustrating reality for game developers since the beginning of the PC game industry.

On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate. On mobile devices, however, driver overhead is even more insidious, robbing both battery life and frame rate.
 
Oh god yes. oh god yes.

giphy.gif
 
If the Steam Machine sells a lot, say hello to OpenGL PC gaming with Linux / SteamOS support.

It just requires a trigger. SteamOS could be it. And of course PS4 is all about that GL
 

Anteater

Member
If the Steam Machine sells a lot, say hello to OpenGL PC gaming with Linux / SteamOS support.

It just requires a trigger. SteamOS could be it. And of course PS4 is all about that GL

So could we expect SteamOS games to have OpenGL support for their windows version?
 

Oppo

Member
If someone would be so kind as to express this graphical power differential in one of the commonly accepted formats, such as: volkswagens, football fields, libraries of congress, or I suppose (for the anklebiters) Dragonball Z power levels, it would be much appreciated.
 

nampad

Member
Makes me happy to see AMD on board. Thought they are busy talking about Mantle.
API fragmentation is the last thing I want as a consumer in the PC market. And as a consumer I think OpenGL is the best solution, although I admittedly don't know anything about the technical specifications.
 
If someone would be so kind as to express this graphical power differential in one of the commonly accepted formats, such as: volkswagens, football fields, libraries of congress, or I suppose (for the anklebiters) Dragonball Z power levels, it would be much appreciated.

DirectX:
MajinBuuFatNV-1-.png



OpenGL:
KidBuuEvil01.png
 

syko de4d

Member
So will we see benefits of this in AAA development or is it targeted at smaller developers?

Edit: Yeah I am a member now =P

Gratulation :)

One AAA dev who will benefit from this will be 100% Valve, Source 2.0 focus is heavily on OpenGL i believe. And i bet source 2.0 will be a great engine for smaller devs too. Cryengine gets Linux support too in the near future.
 
Gratulation :)

One AAA dev who will benefit from this will be 100% Valve, Source 2.0 focus is heavily on OpenGL i believe. And i bet source 2.0 will be a great engine for smaller devs too. Cryengine gets Linux support too in the near future.

Thank you =)

So this is Steam machine/PC news and will probably mean nothing to consoles?
 

FacelessSamurai

..but cry so much I wish I had some
I always thought that direct x was a more advanced api on a graphical level, even people like john carmack saying that open gl just couldn't keep up with direct x anymore. On PC, as far as I am aware, all the big graphics intensive (best looking) games are all direct x, making me think that you will still see direct x being dominant and relevant for quite some time.
 

nampad

Member
Gratulation :)

One AAA dev who will benefit from this will be 100% Valve, Source 2.0 focus is heavily on OpenGL i believe. And i bet source 2.0 will be a great engine for smaller devs too. Cryengine gets Linux support too in the near future.

Isn't Valve's support for Source really bad compared to other middleware solutions? I think the small developers have better alternatives.
 
I hope this pans out with OpenGL. OpenGL should be used more often than it has been. Push more companies to make OpenGL games so that they can be played on Linux as well without a problem.
 

VillageBC

Member
Back in my day, it was OpenGL or nothing... I look forward to the return of the king.

I'm not a developer, but it strikes me as OpenGL makes sense for developers to pursue more and more. You have PS4(?), Linux, mobile and even Windows all with OpenGL implementations. Would that make porting engines and games easier on the devs?
 
Back in my day, it was OpenGL or nothing... I look forward to the return of the king.

I'm not a developer, but it strikes me as OpenGL makes sense for developers to pursue more and more. You have PS4(?), Linux, mobile and even Windows all with OpenGL implementations. Would that make porting engines and games easier on the devs?

The question is, does the Xbone support OpenGL or is it ONLY DX?
 

sub_o

Member
I've never programmed with DirectX before, and have some intermediate OpenGL 3 experiences. But here are some questions, that might be good to know.

  • How's DirectX compared to OpenGL when it comes to ease of writing a new simple application?
  • How about the wrangling of extensions in OpenGL, how did people handle it in DirectX? ARB has always been a nightmare.
  • How much difference is there between GLSL and HLSL?

And since we're talking about going open, can OpenCL do, say 80% of things that CUDA managed to achieve?
 

syko de4d

Member
Isn't Valve's support for Source really bad compared to other middleware solutions? I think the small developers have better alternatives.

Things can change with Source 2.0.
Source 1 is very very old, released way before all this Indi friendly engine hype with UE3 and Unity have started :D
 

Zaptruder

Banned
Well this is rather good news for Virtual Reality.

VR:*we need way more performance*

industry: *TAKE OUR PERFORMANCES!*
 

Somnid

Member
15x for cleaning up garbage code maybe. Even coding to the metal would net you 20% at best for something already decent.
 

Falcon511

Banned
Yes dont we all love Nvidias buzzwords? Talk most of them with a grain of salt mind you. Still good news for linux and its future with gaming.

I dont think this is going to 100 percent replace DX12. Again the doom and gloom can stop.
 
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