[Development] The Dynamic OpenGL on Windows Change

[Sean Harmer]

Hi Andre,

On Thursday 27 February 2014 20:36:51 andre wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 02:28:26PM +0000, Sean Harmer wrote:
> You miss the point that Qt "users" are typically developers themselves,
> who have not just their own development machine to take care of (plus
> their corporate IT...) but an application they wish to make as widely and
> as easily available as possible. Offering a real end user a choice
> "Do you wish to install our application on a machine that has good
> OpenGL support, or would you prefer to download an ANGLE based version?"
> is a no-go.
> 
> Not addressing the problem on the Qt side just shifts the burden to
> the "developer-users", multiplying the work needed by a factor in the
> order of "developer-users with real end-users".

Not at all. I want our developers to have the best experience possible. I just 
don't want it to come at the cost of other developers who need to do more than 
only use Qt Quick 2. Anyway it seems we've reached a consensus in the other 
parts of this thread about a way forwards.

> You could have argued that given the general state of OpenGL support
> in the wild it is a questionable choice as "painting abstraction layer",
> and some people might have agreed, but consolidating the number of
> physical builds helps at least at the user visible layer. ("user" in
> the widest sense: Release team, "developer-users", end users)

I agree that using OpenGL across the board on windows is perhaps not the best 
choice at this time due to the highly variable driver quality and 
availability. It may be that for Qt6 we should consider providing an 
abstraction at a different level to allow for a genuine Direct3D renderer for 
Qt Quick in a similar way that the likes of OGRE offer the choice. However, 
that is a far bigger change. Another option would be to have provide 
assistance in providing a software fallback in the form of mesa + llvmpipe or 
similar.

Have a good weekend,

Sean

--
Dr Sean Harmer | sean.harmer at kdab.com | Managing Director UK
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, a KDAB Group company
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