The write-up by the Dolphin team is also worth reading: <a href="https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/" rel="nofollow">https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and...</a>
Not a vendor per se, but since they pretty much prevent you from installing any updated drivers I'll also say: Apple's OpenGL support is horrid. Like, buggy, entirely behind the times, incredibly slow. I tend to reboot my mac into windows whenever I need to do actual graphics coding, which is a shame.
It's not just affecting 3D applications that need OpenGL though. I find it sad that we have no modern standard akin to VESA / VBE -- to get any reasonable graphics at all at your native display resolution, you have to live with an incredibly complicated (and unreliable) graphics stack. Purely CPU based rendering (which was fast enough in the 90s) is no longer a choice really.
Most of those things pretty much stem from the fact that OpenGL is nowhere near priority for those companies - D3D game performance in benchmarks is what sells the accelerators. Additional features like HW video encoders are second.<p>OGL support is far behind.
I'm completely missing the mobile space in this writeup, but I bet it is a situation even worse than ATI (no way to update the GPU drivers, short of a full OS upgrade on Android)
I have been wondering about this for long time. The biggest cost in GPU development isn't the Hardware itself. But the drivers. Nvidia famously said they have much more software engineers then hardware guys. And as history can tell having great Hardware on paper means nothing when your Drivers aren't being up to standard ( S3, PowerVR on Desktop). Hence the smaller group of GPU maker were forced out because they dont have the resources to complete on the software front.<p>And yet over the decades nothing has improved. When Browser wanted to do hardware Acceleration there were many Laptop GPU being blacklisted simply because they dont have any drivers update. Situation is much better on Mac because the drivers and testing happens to be the same people.<p>There are people who wanted the GPU to be just another CPU. Intel Larrabee. But none of them has succeeded.<p>I wouldn't have thought with GPU IP taking rounds, drivers quality being in the hands of vendor would have improve the situation abit. However it seems no one wants to invest into it.<p>So do we have no solution for this? Rumors has it Apple are designing their own GPU. May be they are tackling the drivers problem themselves by getting rid of it?
ATI drivers are horrible on the Mac OS X platform too, even though Apple controls all their drivers on the platform. Even though Intel's GPUs are slow their drivers are very stable and work most of the time.
In my experience of writing a GL Windows desktop app alone, driver bugs have been the #1 cause of stability problems for real end users. It's a complete nightmare, with pretty much every manufacturer. I guess that's what happens when hardware companies need to write software.
Is it practical to create a driver abstraction that masks cross vendor issues and provides a consistent interface to the dev? Like what jquery did for browsers.
I assume driver incompatibility and things of this nature are one reason why so many games are built on engines like Unreal, Crytek, Unity, etc.? At some point you need to be working on shipping a game, not writing driver compatibility code that a framework could/should handle for you.
What's horrible is I've done almost zero OpenGL dev and I could pick these out <i>immediately</i> based on anecdotal experiences with drivers on Windows. Vendor B might be getting better (supposedly), but I still have a tendency to shy away from their drivers (thus, them) due to past experiences.