Year of the Linux Desktop

It's closer than you think!

Microsoft has decided to turn into Apple, and will be moving towards closing their OS ecosystem and focusing on making their own hardware/software products:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/technology-business/microsoft-pc-and-tablet-makers-youre-not-our-future-195877

Valve is releasing Steam and Source Engine for Linux, allowing 3rd parties to release for Linux as well:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-steam-and-source-for-linux-signals-low-confidence-for-windows-8

Valve is developing an open game system/common platform based on Linux and PC hardware:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/40592/Valve-confirms-console-and-mobile-hardware-plan

Wayland 1.0 release this summer, finally something to replace X11/X.org:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzQ
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5OTY

Furthermore, the continued economic recession/depression will drive more and more businesses to adopt Linux, and this will increase spread to user's homes. As consumer's budgets become smaller, they will adopt Linux in increasing numbers as they become aware of it through the grape vine and wish to keep their old computer hardware running without relying on unsupported and out-of-date software.

Those with money will choose Apple over Microsoft.

Microsoft's business model is dead.

>>46
>What about the wiggle ShareLists function and the shareList parameter to GLX CreateContext?
Display lists were deprecated in OpenGL 3.1, and they don't work with vertex/index buffers anyway which is pretty much how all rendering is done these days. Display lists were meant for capturing immediate mode rendering calls only. They need to resurrect the display list idea and make it work for everything.

>NVIDIA's bindless, GL_AMD_pinned_memory
This is admittedly a problem, mostly because there's no work-around within shaders when the GPU does not support this, which is why you won't see it a part of the core API of either Direct3D or OpenGL. There's no standardized fused memory model across the various vendors yet, although AMD's FSA is good step in this direction. On the XBox 360, the memory model is already merged and there are proprietary extensions added to Direct3D9 to allow you to do this, but on the desktop, you are SOL.

>GL_AMD_sparse_texture
Direct3D 11.1 allows you to discard and page in mipmap levels through resource views, which can be used for sparse 1D, 2D, or 3D texture maps. It's equivalent to GL_AMD_sparse_texture.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh404616%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Final Verdict:

You: +1 Me: +2 Sussman: +∞

>>47
In games or simulations, when rendering large scenes, hidden surface removal is an important part of the rendering pipeline in order to make it perform adequately. The fastest polygons are the ones that are never drawn. Typically, you need to traverse some sort of spatial tree representing the world and cull geometry that isn't inside the view frustum or that is occluded by other geometry, and then build a final draw command list that you then sort based on certain criteria. On systems with enough spare CPU cores, you can farm out this work to multiple cores and buid a command list for each render stage.