Once upon a time, there was the Delphi3d.net database. It held a vast database of OpenGL driver versions for various different graphics cards. It listed innumerable hardware-specific bits of information about them (the core implementation-specific queries, for example), as well as what extensions each version supported.
This was a very useful tool. One that has been gone for some time. Is there any way the ARB could set up a similar database?
The way it worked was that you could download and run a small program that tested what your driver could do and sent it to the server. The server put the information in the database. There was a set of various web-scripts used to access that information. It’d be a great idea if the ARB could do something like that again.
The real problem is the database itself (and the HTML access to it). That requires a server, which is not something that people can just sort of have. Writing the application to collate the data is simplicity by comparison.
The useful part of the database was being able to see, for example, how widely adopted a particular extension or version is. Seeing what your current hardware and driver does is trivial; it’s what other people have that’s important.
So you can only access the “database” by running the app? And the app is only available on MSWin/Mac. So this database is inaccessible to Linux devs. That’s unfortunate. Would have been useful.
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