[forum] Some perspective from the cheap seats...

[Allen Akin]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 11:33:04AM -0500, David Dawes wrote:
|                                      ...  I think that competition
| is a good thing, and it was disappointing that the GL types didn't
| feel strongly enough about it to demonstrate a GL-based alternative.

There are some fundamental differences between what the UI community
wants (at least as I understand it), and what the hardware will be able
to deliver -- or at least the ways in which the hardware will deliver
it.  Keith was willing to address the UI folks' requests fairly
directly, even if some of the resulting features couldn't be supported
by the hardware or involved infrastructure differing from what was
developed for OpenGL.  That wasn't true for a lot of us in the OpenGL
community.

The question I'd raise now is whether the UI folks (and for that matter,
other users of X11) understand where graphics hardware programmability
is going.  Maybe it offers compelling advantages in performance and
features to you.  If so, it may still be possible for the GL world and
other graphics worlds to share important infrastructure (resource
management, data formats, high-performance datapaths, etc.).

Allen