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Valve's VOGL Debugger Makes It Even Easier To Debug OpenGL Games

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Peter Lohrmann has been working on Valve's VOGL debugger to make it easier to use for developers looking to it for help.

image
QuoteVoglEditor now has support for launching and tracing your application, directly from the UI. Previously, (and still available) you'd have to launch your application from the command line, which could add confusion on where to supply vogl or application command line arguments.


That's quite a big barrier to break-down, which means it should be easier than ever to use VOGL and that's impressive work especially as it's open source.

After a week of multiple blog posts talking down on OpenGL it's nice to find something good around it, a decent (and user friendly!) OpenGL debugger is something that developers have wanted for years.

See the full blog post on it here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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FTW Jun 3, 2014
Valve is just great :D
Daifuku Jun 3, 2014
I don't understand a bit of the opengl drama but I like to follow it
DMJC Jun 4, 2014
OpenGL Drama summed up:
ATi/AMD hasn't put enough resources into their OpenGL drivers despite having 15-20 odd years to do so.

Game developers used to ATi/AMD having decent performance on Windows are crying about OpenGL being a mess because they're encountering all the bad things about ATi/AMD that make Linux users avoid them.

ProTip: There's nothing wrong with OpenGL, just with ATi/AMD's lack of developer manpower in getting OpenGL working correctly. Maybe if they hired some of the University of Utah guys who helped invent OpenGL and put some real resources into making a decent driver. they wouldn't be crying about it not working now.

Remember that for years Linux/Unix was a second class citizen on ATi/AMD whereas NVIDIA went out of their way to support Solaris, Mac OSX, FreeBSD and Linux. Now that the market is swinging back towards UNIX with OSX/Linux AMD's been caught out.

Too bad so sad. I'll keep running Intel and NVIDIA hardware which I know works on Linux.Now that NVIDIA is contributing to Nouveau (I suspect because their engineers had a look and realised that Nouveau is actually working and not just a joke project anymore) They probably see it as a way of developing an open source driver without infringing on any of their licensed code/trade secrets that they can't open.
Remember: In benchmarks Michael Larabel at Phoronix.com ran, the nouveau driver outperformed the NVIDIA Binary blob driver when the gpu and memory were forced to run at full speed (bypassing the reclocking issue)
lev258 Jun 4, 2014
Quoting: DMJCOpenGL Drama summed up:
ATi/AMD hasn't put enough resources into their OpenGL drivers despite having 15-20 odd years to do so.

Game developers used to ATi/AMD having decent performance on Windows are crying about OpenGL being a mess because they're encountering all the bad things about ATi/AMD that make Linux users avoid them.

ProTip: There's nothing wrong with OpenGL, just with ATi/AMD's lack of developer manpower in getting OpenGL working correctly. Maybe if they hired some of the University of Utah guys who helped invent OpenGL and put some real resources into making a decent driver. they wouldn't be crying about it not working now.

Remember that for years Linux/Unix was a second class citizen on ATi/AMD whereas NVIDIA went out of their way to support Solaris, Mac OSX, FreeBSD and Linux. Now that the market is swinging back towards UNIX with OSX/Linux AMD's been caught out.

Too bad so sad. I'll keep running Intel and NVIDIA hardware which I know works on Linux.Now that NVIDIA is contributing to Nouveau (I suspect because their engineers had a look and realised that Nouveau is actually working and not just a joke project anymore) They probably see it as a way of developing an open source driver without infringing on any of their licensed code/trade secrets that they can't open.
Remember: In benchmarks Michael Larabel at Phoronix.com ran, the nouveau driver outperformed the NVIDIA Binary blob driver when the gpu and memory were forced to run at full speed (bypassing the reclocking issue)
As far as I know, Nvidia still isn't helping the nouveau team (they just contribute to Tegra support). On the contrary, AMD guys put effort to the open drivers.
john Jun 4, 2014
"VoglEditor now has support for launching and tracing your application, directly from the UI."

"That's quite a big barrier to break-down, which means it should be easier than ever to use VOGL and that's impressive work especially as it's open source"

Had a good laugh about the "big barrier" comment. This would have been a good joke if the author meant windows programmers, but seriously you can not call this a barier for opengl programmers or even programmers in general.
Liam Dawe Jun 4, 2014
Maybe I did mean Windows programmers? Having to drop to a command line is a pain for a lot of people and the quicker Linux elitists realise that the better we will all be. We have to break out of this mentality if we will ever accept windows converts.

Spread love not hate.
Hamish Jun 4, 2014
Quoting: DMJCI'll keep running Intel and NVIDIA hardware which I know works on Linux. Now that NVIDIA is contributing to Nouveau (I suspect because their engineers had a look and realised that Nouveau is actually working and not just a joke project anymore) They probably see it as a way of developing an open source driver without infringing on any of their licensed code/trade secrets that they can't open.

This is in fact something that AMD has actually been doing since acquiring ATI in 2007, putting a huge effort into the actual plumbing work of the Linux graphics stack that Nouveau relies upon, alongside other FOSS supporting vendors and developers such as Intel, Red Hat, and Novell. And has already been pointed out, Nvidia has only been supporting Nouveau in terms of their Tegra support, and do not seem to have any plans to expand upon this to any of their other chip-sets.

Because of this it is AMD cards that have the most performant free software drivers available for higher end hardware. Which incidentally is off topic and has nothing to do with VOGL, but when there is that much FUD being slung around someone does need to respond to it just so such scaths do not actually discredit all the hard work that has been done to make the free graphics ecosystem actually competitive.
John Jun 4, 2014
Quoting: GuestAs much as you may laugh, a decent gui is required when helping developers come from a windows environment to a *nix one - which has been the focus of Valve's work.
Command lines aren't second nature to everybody, and if you've seen the vogl command line...well, a gui makes it easier for people to run their application with vogl.

I do use vogl nowaday, its not that hard really and works fine to... but can and will be improved. My remark was that its hardly a big barrier for programmers. The first thing most programmers learn is wrting commandline software, at best it offers better ergonomics to programmers. Besides most programmers are lazy bastards and definitly will integrate it in their IDE.

Grantend, better GUI's on Linux definitly help. But speaking OpenGL programming its the tooling that needs improvement.
E911 Jun 5, 2014
Thanks Valve for a OP OpenGL Tool.

Being Super Awesome As Always.
Half-Shot Jun 5, 2014
Quoting: lev258
Quoting: DMJCOpenGL Drama summed up:
ATi/AMD hasn't put enough resources into their OpenGL drivers despite having 15-20 odd years to do so.

Game developers used to ATi/AMD having decent performance on Windows are crying about OpenGL being a mess because they're encountering all the bad things about ATi/AMD that make Linux users avoid them.

ProTip: There's nothing wrong with OpenGL, just with ATi/AMD's lack of developer manpower in getting OpenGL working correctly. Maybe if they hired some of the University of Utah guys who helped invent OpenGL and put some real resources into making a decent driver. they wouldn't be crying about it not working now.

Remember that for years Linux/Unix was a second class citizen on ATi/AMD whereas NVIDIA went out of their way to support Solaris, Mac OSX, FreeBSD and Linux. Now that the market is swinging back towards UNIX with OSX/Linux AMD's been caught out.

Too bad so sad. I'll keep running Intel and NVIDIA hardware which I know works on Linux.Now that NVIDIA is contributing to Nouveau (I suspect because their engineers had a look and realised that Nouveau is actually working and not just a joke project anymore) They probably see it as a way of developing an open source driver without infringing on any of their licensed code/trade secrets that they can't open.
Remember: In benchmarks Michael Larabel at Phoronix.com ran, the nouveau driver outperformed the NVIDIA Binary blob driver when the gpu and memory were forced to run at full speed (bypassing the reclocking issue)
As far as I know, Nvidia still isn't helping the nouveau team (they just contribute to Tegra support). On the contrary, AMD guys put effort to the open drivers.

Exactly, AMD have engineers writing code right now for the open driver and Nvidia simply released a few files detaling some parts of the GPUs.
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