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by johnl87 5106 days ago
Finally someone actually works in the cg industry replies. +1 to this. No one really uses fixed function stuff these days, everything is shaders and vertex and index buffers. There are no fixed function hardware units, everything in the graphics pipeline is programmable and done in shaders. Even using fixed function stuff on today's hardware forces the driver to compile a built in shader. In the interest of keeping driver size small (for mobile apps), they force the programmers to write their own shaders and throw away the fixed function stuff that would bloat the driver and slow the shader compiler.
2 comments
c3d 5106 days ago
New code doesn't use fixed function stuff these days. JWZ's point is that there is more than new code. Legacy code also matters, e.g. CAD applications. Those have little use for shaders. Frankly, your point of view sounds very game-centric to me.

Both nVidia and ATI have committed to supporting these older APIs for the foreseeable future.

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seclorum 5106 days ago
Old code doesn't just convert itself to using shaders and vertex and index buffers.

Also: old code isn't necessary un-useful code.

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alttab 5106 days ago
Maybe not - but imagine the loss in hardware sales and ecosystem revenue if everyone ported old shitty games without re-writing them, causing batteries to die quickly and a poor user experience?

It was for the better of the industry. Boo-hoo. If it took him 3 days then hes a smart fucker. As someone with plenty of OpenGL AND OpenGL ES experience, I'd say it would have taken him just has much time to port his existing code.

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CountSessine 5105 days ago
And if that were the end of the story, I think we'd be able to call it a day. But everyone has this funny expectation that that old code should keep getting faster with newer GPUs, in spite of the fact that GPUs don't work the way those programs were designed to use them.

Getting modern GPU performance, or anything close to it, through the crufty old immediate-mode API code is like drawing blood from a stone. Eventually developers need to take some responsibility for the code they're maintaining and migrate to a more modern API. Even on the desktop they'll have to do this - when their customers ask for modern GPU features, they'll have to move to OpenGL 3, which doesn't have immediate-mode either.

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