Why Cinema 4D R22 deprecated OpenGL?

#1

Why is this feature considered now as deprecated? Most users of X-Particles understand my sadness :confused:

#2

Open GL is outdated. It does not support many features current GPUs offer. Also Apple stopped supporting OpenGL. There are way more modern options now, OGL had its time, but now it is over.

#3

OK and thank you for your explanation, I see it as the developers should have fixed the new limitation viewport after the OpenGl is no more supported… I would guess that if something is deprecated something new will replace the old one feature with a lot more features :frowning:

#4

But… it has been replaced. On Windows it is replaced with DirectX, and on Mac with Metal. Both are faster and have more features than OpenGL, and will receive continued investment from the OS vendors.

Is there something that OpenGL did that is not accommodated now?

#5

In a DCC performance bottlenecks are typically nowhere near the graphics driver so other than unrepresentative edge cases a modern graphics will not add leaps in performance. Even in game engines which are highly optimised the performance difference can be moot most of the time and barely noticeable the rest of the time.

Mac users may have seen a performance improvement with Metal but that’s not because Metal is fast it’s because Mac OpenGL was horrendously slow. I dual booted my Mac Pro between Windows and OS X and Windows was night and day faster on identical hardware for OpenGL, the bottleneck there was Apple’s dreadful OpenGL implementation. Apple’s multi SOC strategy for M chips also looks like the latency in inter SOC communication ruins performance scaling which has probably led to the Apple Silicon Mac Pro being mothballed for the time being. The scaling of the Studio Ultra is so bad that I now wonder if Apple will be calling up AMD again for discrete GPUs for the Mac Pro.

A well coded OpenGL backend vs a modern graphics API offers virtually nothing to a 3d DCC as the bottlenecks are in the CPU path e.g. scene graph and deformers etc. Any C4D user can tell you that, Direct X and Metal can’t help C4D’s lamentable object management performance.

But APIs like Vulkan are the future and do offer continued development and means to bring greater fidelity to the viewport. It’s been a few years now since Maxon supported Metal and Direct X so I wonder what features they now support above the old OpenGL viewport because, to be frank, when I look at contemporary C4D demos I see the same old sluggish, featureless and ugly viewport that has existed since time immemorial. What are these new features that have been brought to the C4D viewport?

#6

I am just sad because of Insydium, they do not support ambient occlusion or other effects in viewport looks now bad, but all this used to be just fine with OpenGL…

So this all must mean they have not developed it for DirectX it all means.

#7

Why are you blaming Insydium?

XParticles is a plugin which piggybacks onto the infrastructure that Maxon provides in C4D, they are not responsible for viewport rendering as far as I know. I would ask Maxon why AO is no longer working. Good luck getting an answer though they seem incommunicative when inconvenient questions are asked.

The problem appears to be that Maxon does not understand how valuable a performant and high fidelity viewport is to the artist. There is absolutely no way they understand this because if they did they would’ve fixed it by now, it’s a long running saga with seemingly no end in sight.

Maxon is adding some excellent new features especially in dynamics but the underlying architecture is no longer fit for purpose, it hasn’t been since around R13. I have no idea how artists manage to work in C4D these days having worked with software that handles massive scenes and have high fidelity viewports now with real-time compositing, it’s just liberating for the artist and your productivity reaches new levels.

I regularly found my dataviz projects running at < 1fps is C4D which motivated me to use other software. I regularly have frame rates > 20 fps (on a really old PC) for similar projects. Show me one C4D user who doesn’t want that?

#8

Thank you for your answer, back to the viewport and Insydium topic. I do not want to blame anyone here I just wanted to point to something I do not understand (I might complaining)… There is new DirectX viewport, ok. There are all featureas like it was under OpenGl… like ambient occlusion etc… But it no longer working with Insydium but mograph and other object in C4D viewport. So my question is why is that?

#9

Only Insydium or Maxon can give you a definitive answer. Have you asked on the Insydium Discord? I haven’t been there for years but they weren’t particularly responsive back then, things may have changed?? You may find other users could confirm the issue too.

Check your graphics driver, update if necessary. Then report as a bug to both Insydium and Maxon. This would be my course of action.

AO is useful as it makes individual particles stand out in the crowd so it’s an important feature to have working.

#10

Yes i have already reported a bug but i got only very simple answer… that the OpenGL is no longer working and that because the new viewport is now DirectX it just look like that now… nothing about development. It is all too mysterious.

#11

You don’t say who gave you that information, Insydium or Maxon?

Despite earlier in the thread the Maxon rep confidently saying OpenGL doesn’t support modern GPU features it could well be that Maxon does not yet support AO in DirectX. Surely using modern graphics APIs was supposed to add features not lose them…?

I wonder if Apple Metal supports AO in the viewport, can anyone confirm?

#12

insydium gave me that info… The ambient occlusion works with the C4D environment and all geo in it

#13

This information would’ve been more useful earlier in the thread!

My guess is that particles are a ‘special’ virtual object type or instance and when XParticles hands them over to the viewport for rendering the new DirectX implementation does not include it in the AO calculation. If you used the Geometry Object in XParticles my guess is that AO would be rendered but it’s quite unsuitable for large numbers of particles.

Can you test Scene Nodes with huge numbers of instances, do they render AO?