OpenGL Is Broken
This post is factually wrong, and misguided. Here's why:<p>#Preamble: Except on Windows you cannot run Direct3D anywhere else. Unless you plan not to publish on Android, iOS, OSX, Linux, Steambox, PS4 etc. you will have to target OpenGL, no matter how much you dislike it.<p>#1: Yes the lowest common denominator issue is annoying. However, in some cases you can make use of varying features by implementing different renderpaths, and in other cases it doesn't matter much. But factually wrong is that there would be something like a "restricted subset of GL4". Such a thing does not exist. You either have GL4 core with all its features, or you don't. Perhaps author means that GL4 isn't available everywhere, and they have to fall back to GL3?<p>#2: Yes driver quality for OpenGL is bad. It is getting better though, and I'd suggest rather than complaining about OpenGL, how about you complain about Microsoft, Dell, HP, Nvidia, AMD etc.?<p>#compiler in the driver: Factually this conclusion is completely backwards. First of all the syntactic compile overhead isn't what makes compilation slow necessairly. GCC can compile dozens of megabytes of C source code in a very short time (<10ms). Drivers may not implement their lexers etc. quite well, but that's not the failing of the specification. Secondly, Direct3D is also moving away from its intermediary bytecode compile target, and is favoring delivery of HLSL source code more.<p>#Threading: As author mentions himself, DX11 didn't manage to solve this issue. In fact, the issue isn't with OpenGL at all. It's in the nature of GPUs and how drivers talk to them. Again author seems to be railing against the wrong machine.<p>#Sampler state: Again factually wrong information. This extension <a href="http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/sampler_objects.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/sampler_objects.txt</a> allows to decouple texture state from sampler state. This has been elevated to core functionality in GL4. The unit issue has not been resolved however, but nvidia did propose a DSA extension, which so far wasn't taken up by any other vendor. Suffice to say, most hardware does not support DSA, and underneath, it's all texture units, even in Direct3D, so railing against texture units is a complete red herring.<p>#Many ways to do the same thing: Again many factual errors. Most of the "many ways" that author is railing against are legacy functions, that are not available in core profile. It's considered extremely bad taste to run a compatibility (to earlier versions) profile and mix&mash various strata of APIs together. That'd be a bit like using Direct3D 8 and 11 functionality in the same program. Author seems to basically fail in setting up his GL context cleanly, or doesn't even know what "core profile" means.<p>#Remainder: Lots of handwaving about various vaguely defined things and objecting to condjmp in the driver, again, author seems to be railing against the wrong machine.<p>Conclusion: Around 90% of the article is garbage. But sure, OpenGL isn't perfect, and it's got its warts, like everything, and it should be improved. But how about you get the facts right next time?