OpenGL on Linux

[Markus Mohrhard]

Hey,


On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:57 PM, Anthonys Lists <antlists at youngman.org.uk>wrote:

> On 10/02/2014 13:32, Ruslan Kabatsayev wrote:
>
>> I'd like to note that there're still lots of video cards which are not
>> even 2.0 capable - e.g. intel video in my EEE PC 1015PN only supports
>> OpenGL 1.4 with ARB assembly shaders. Another example would be
>> (although quite old, but still working and actively supported by intel
>> in Mesa) i915G chipset, which has similar characteristics.
>> Also, if you try using Mesa 9.1+ with these, you'll get (exactly, not
>> higher than) OpenGL 2.1 advertised, but really giving you software
>> fallbacks every now and then.
>> So, I'd not like to have an office suite require OpenGL higher than
>> 1.4 (it may use higher versions if they are available, but still not
>> require).
>>
> I'll add that I have literally just retired my old No 2 workstation which
> had a Matrox Millenium or similar graphics card - and have also re-purposed
> a Matrox G440. I don't know what OpenGL these are, but the hardware is all
> Y2K era, and still working fine. I suspect that's older than i915 (the
> processors are Socket A).
>
>

I'm sorry but there is no chance that I will support OpenGL 1.x with this
feature. Even if there is still hardware out there it amkes no sense to
work with a standard that is so old that it has been deprecated by Khronos
several years ago. We will simply not support this feature on such
hardware. Luckily glew allows us to make this a runtime check so it will
just not be available.

It is a bit more complicated with OpenGL 2.x and 3.x as they are much
closer. As it seems most people already have support for 3.x on Linux +
everyone on Windows and modern Macs. In general every recommendation is to
avoid using the compatibility context and use the new core context that was
introduced with 3.0. Targeting OpenGl 1.x with the fixed pipeline is just
stupid while writing new code.

In general we are making the OpenGL stuff right now runtime optional by
using glew while it was compile time optional before. In general I'm one of
the persons who is more in favor of dropping support for older versions but
I had some discussions with other developers who disagree. We will see how
this plays out.

Regards,
Markus
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