Former Valve/VOGL Dev: OpenGL Next Could Take 3+ Years

Rich Geldreich, one of the original Valve Linux team members who started work on their VOGL OpenGL debugger, thinks it will take three years or more before the next-generation OpenGL materializes for users.

Geldreich sadly left Valve earlier this year without disclosing his reasons at the time. It turns out he's now relocating back to Dallas, Texas and will be working for a start-up. The former Valve and former Microsoft developer has written his first blog post in a while and made a few interesting remarks:

- Geldreich gives a big shout out to RAD Game Tools for their help with Steam on Linux and VOGL. Rich actually suggests that Gabe Newell should buy out RAD...

- Rich feels bad to the Linux and GL communities for leaving Valve before completing VOGL, but he feels he left it in a good position with a future ahead. Developers at Valve and LunarG continue working on VOGL.

- Rich thinks it will be "3 years or more before OpenGL-Next is usable and relevant to shipping products." OpenGL-Next is the Khronos Group's work towards a next-generation OpenGL to compete with Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12, and AMD's Mantle. The time-line isn't too big of a surprise considering the API still needs to be designed and go through committee review, etc. Depending on how invasive it is compared to current OpenGL 4, it could take a while before GPU silicon ends up supporting all of its features.

You can read Geldreich's post in full via his Blogspot. Good luck to Rich in Dallas!