John Carmack und die APIs

Markus Hoffmann
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John Carmack, von vielen wegen seiner grandiosen Grafik-Engines und seinem Fachwissen darüber bewundert, hat zum Thema Grafik-APIs Stellung genommen.

So sieht er OpenGL und DirectX als gut und leistungsvoll an, jedoch sind sie nicht zukunftsträchtig und man müsse daher eine komplett neue, auf C basierende API entwickeln, welche den Ansprüchen zukünftiger Applikationen genügen werde. Das gesamte Statement gibt es bei SlashDot.org.

We are rapidly approaching a real golden age for graphics programming. Currently, cards and API's are a complex mess of hundreds of states and function calls, but the next two years will see the addition of the final primitive functionality needed to allow arbitrarily complex operations with graceful performance degradation. At that point, a higher level graphics API will finally make good sense. There is debate over exactly what it is going to look like, but the model will be like C. Just like any CPU can compile any C program (with various levels of efficiency), any graphics card past this point will be able to run any shader. Some hardware vendors are a bit concerned about this, because bullet point features that you have that the other guy doesn't are a major marketing feature, but the direction is a technical inevitability. They will just have to compete on price and performance.