world of warcraft Cata droping openGL

lomaxfalconer · Post by **lomaxfalconer** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 7:00 pm

it seems wow is moving towards GLL for the Macs and could be dropping the normal OpenGL.

how is this going to effect running WOW with wine ?

right now running wow under directX is painful and so slow on my system thats it just not a option.

doh123 · Post by **doh123** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 9:41 pm

They cannot drop OpenGL for Macs.. but yeah, they might drop support on it for Windows...

from someone at Blizzard...

GLL is only the backend name, this is not a framework or a public library. All backends on MacOSX use OpenGL, there's nothing else...

A backend is the graphic engine layer that implements the platform specific graphics functions. Most games have only one per platform. WoW is different because it's been in development for years and needs to be constantly updated.

posted here...
http://wow-blue.com/mac-technical-suppo ... api-s.html

lomaxfalconer · Post by **lomaxfalconer** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 10:10 pm

yes i know but if i SET it to GLL it sees me on a windows system because of wine and puts me in DirectX mode. if they not drop OpenGL but us GLL it does mean you have to be on a MAC in order to use OpenGL thu the GLL front end.

that mean All wine users will be stuck in DirectX made and thats real bad.

Adys · Post by **Adys** » Thu Sep 30, 2010 7:13 am

Blizzard is not dropping OpenGL on Windows just yet. They actually added some features to it in Cataclysm (addition of the hardware cursor for example).

However, the Windows-OpenGL engine is *extremely bad* in the current versions. It instantly crashes underwater, it doesn't support new water engine nor sunshafts, still no dynamic shadow support, etc.

The good news, now:
The d3d engine is *really good* in Cataclysm. And the Wine d3d devs have done an absolutely fantastic job these past years at improving d3d9 support in wine, up to the point that, on nvidia cards, the d3d engine actually runs smoother than the opengl engine in Cataclysm. And I can tell you that much: on max settings, it looks amazing.

But yes, the opengl-windows support is very sad right now. Will they eventually drop it? Perhaps. I hope not, especially since a large codebase is shared between mac and windows client, sane thing would be to fix whatever's currently broken.

Adys · Post by **Adys** » Thu Sep 30, 2010 7:14 am

lomaxfalconer wrote:yes i know but if i SET it to GLL it sees me on a windows system because of wine and puts me in DirectX mode. if they not drop OpenGL but us GLL it does mean you have to be on a MAC in order to use OpenGL thu the GLL front end.

that mean All wine users will be stuck in DirectX made and thats real bad.

There has never been GLL support on Windows. GLL uses Apple-specific extensions.

lomaxfalconer · Post by **lomaxfalconer** » Thu Sep 30, 2010 3:48 pm

well i get 60 fps with wow set to openGL and i get 8FPS when it is set to DirectX why ? this is in the same place in the game.