[gameprogrammer] Re: OpenGL reality check.

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 09:30 +1300, Jake Briggs wrote:
> This is a mite off topic, but can you elaborate on the difficulties of 
> getting openGL drivers for hardware? I mean, I have never had any 
> problems, but I am a gamer and have only ever owned nvidia, ATI and 3dfx 
> (FTW!) cards. Are other chipsets unsupported by their makers? What are 
> these chipsets, so that I may avoid them!

I don't really know. Most of them were just normal consumer grade
computers. In the past most of the students were gamers and had nVidia
and ATI graphics cards. This time most of the students were not hard
core gamers and had off the shelf computers. In other words, they were
casual gamers with the kind of computers that the rest of the world
have. 

                Bob Pendleton

> 
> This is what happens when money, greed and the need for control comes 
> before standards (either defacto or agreed upon) and treating your 
> customers right. Sorry, sorry, I know there was supposed to be no 
> flames, but I get pretty angry as I see companies subvert technology for 
> their own gains all the time. Feel free to ignore this last paragraph....

OK, I'll ignore it.

> 
> 
> Bob Pendleton wrote:
> 
> >I teach a game programming class at the local community college. To save
> >time, effort, and confusion, I use SDL and OpenGL to teach with. I let
> >the students use anything they want to develop with, any OS and any
> >libraries, but I strongly encourage them to use SDL and OpenGL. I teach
> >this class during fall semester and have taught it for several years.
> >
> >This approach has worked very well in the past, but this year, not so
> >good. In the past everyone was able to get a high performance version of
> >OpenGL working on there computers. This year, only a couple were able to
> >get OpenGL working on their computers. In several cases there just
> >weren't any decent OpenGL libraries for their video cards and the
> >default MS drivers are terrible, when they work at all. 
> >
> >So I have a couple of questions for the groups.
> >
> >o Is OpenGL still a viable graphics API for use on Windows?
> >o Is there an open source, C/C++, 3D graphics API that works on top of
> >OpenGL on the rest of the world and DirectX on Windows? (I know that
> >Java 3D does that but it isn't much use to SDL programmers.)
> >o Can SDL stay a viable library if OpenGL support on Windows is really
> >as bad as it looks?
> >
> >Please, no flames, not even anti-Microsoft flames. We have all heard
> >them all before and no matter how mad you are about the state of the
> >world the state of the world is what it is and flaming doesn't help.
> >(You have no idea how hard it is for an old flamer like me to say
> >something like that :-)
> >
> >I have cross posted this message to the SDL mailing list and to my own
> >mailing list to try to get different points of view. If you are on only
> >one mailing list and want to see both sides of the discussion please
> >join the other mailing list.
> >
> >             Bob Pendleton
> >
> >  
> >
> 
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