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prideout | 4 months ago

Why is Minecraft mentioned several times in the post?

discuss

order

wirybeige|4 months ago

The post links to this: https://github.com/MCRcortex/nvidium

nvidium is using GL_NV_mesh_shader which is only available for nVIDIA cards. This mod is the only game/mod I know of that uses mesh shaders & is OpenGL. & so the new gl extension will let users of other vendors use the mod if it gets updated to use the new extension.

mellinoe|4 months ago

Presumably because Minecraft is the only application which still uses OpenGL but would use the extension

doubletwoyou|4 months ago

pretty sure the base minecraft rendering engine is still using opengl, and most of the improvement mods also just use opengl so exposing this extension to them is probably important to a game where its 50 billion simple cubes being rendered

FrustratedMonky|4 months ago

Is Minecraft the only thing using OpenGL anymore?

What is the current state of OpenGL, I thought it had faded away?

aj_hackman|4 months ago

It's officially deprecated in favor of Vulkan, but it will likely live on for decades to come due to legacy CAD software and a bunch of older games still using it. I don't share the distaste many have for it, it's good to have a cross-platform medium-complexity graphics API for doing the 90% of rendering that isn't cutting-edge AAA gaming.

Sharlin|4 months ago

It's super frequently recommended as a starting point for learners because it's high level enough to get something on the screen in ten lines of code but low level enough to teach you the fundamentals of how the rendering pipeline works (even though GL's abstraction is rather anachronistic and differs from how modern GPUs actually work). Vulkan (requiring literally a thousand LoC worth of initialization to render a single triangle) is emphatically not any sort of replacement for that use case (and honestly not for 95% of hobbyist/indie use cases either unless you use a high-level abstraction on top of it).

The worst thing about OpenGL is probably the hilariously non-typesafe C API.

kbolino|4 months ago

I don't think any major platform that ever supported OpenGL or OpenGL ES--including desktops, smartphones/tablets, and web browsers--has actually removed it yet. Apple will probably be the first to pull the plug, but they've only aggressively deprecated it so far.