The future of OpenGL

[RogerSanders]

Thanks for your reply. I’ll go through some of your points below.

@Silence

They do not compete because they do not fight in the same arena. I don’t like to say that but it’s like comparing java and C.

I disagree. They’re both APIs for driving the same 3D graphics hardware. They seek to solve the exact same problem. They may have different syntax and conventions, but so do Vulkan and Metal, and I think it’s hard to argue they’re not competing APIs.

@Silence

Apple has specific policies and interests. AFAIK they won’t support Vulkan either but only their Metal API.

Yep, Apple aggressively pursue vendor lock-in, so they want to force people to Metal. That said, Khronos themselves support MoltenVK to open up the platform to Vulkan anyway. There’s no equivalent for OpenGL, even though Khronos could do it if they wanted to. This might seem easy to dismiss, but consider that one of the main compelling reasons to use OpenGL “back in the day” was that it could run “anywhere”. Now it can only run on Windows and (non-Mac) Unix-based environments. They forked the whole spec as OpenGL ES to chase emerging platforms, but they’ve officially canned that. WebGL is slated for replacement by WebGPU. OpenGL’s status as a cross-platform API is dead. That’s a major thing to note IMO, as that was one of the central tenants of the API from day one.

@Silence

Vulkan is a young API, which might bring new functionalities (apart from raytracing). These new functionalities might translate to OpenGL. As an example, if something new and important like shaders, VBO were arise, there’s hope for them be added to GL. Also, and this is not speculation, apart from raytracing, new extensions seldom arise to GL (see for example nvidia mesh shaders).

And yet if there are plans to bring anything new to OpenGL, there’s total radio silence from Khronos about it. As I said, can you find any single comment about anything being worked on or discussed for the future of OpenGL? Hope is one thing, but with Nvidia ignoring OpenGL for their most important new feature (raytracing), and Khronos themselves not seeming to be talking about OpenGL’s future publicly, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything coming down the pipeline. You’d expect at least one speaker at one conference somewhere in the last 18 months to be saying something if there was. All I can see in that time is when Khronos gave a total of 10 minutes to talk about OpenGL (and OpenGL ES) in the 2019 Siggraph. They mentioned few new extensions added, only one of which was from Khronos and was brought over from Vulkan (presumably to aid interop), and the rest of the time they talked about how you should use Vulkan interop if you want to use raytracing features. They didn’t speak about OpenGL or OpenGL ES in different terms at all either, which is significant to me as they’ve stated in the past OpenGL ES won’t have anything new added (vendor extensions notwithstanding).

@Silence

Apart from this, the forum section about ideas for future releases of OpenGL has been removed while the forum was moving from opengl.org to khronos.

I’d add that to the list of evidence that leans in the direction of OpenGL being dead.

@Silence

Finally, are there any reasons why you target both OpenGL and Vulkan ? Do you have to support older hardware ? If that’s the reason, then all future hardware will support Vulkan, so there’s nothing much to worry about any GL 5 or so. You already support OpenGL for older hardware and Vulkan for newer and future ones after all.

I want to avoid getting bogged down in a “why do you need it” line of questioning. There are answers to that question which I’ve alluded to in my first post, but really it’s irrelevant to the question at hand.