What's cross platform? I guess what matters in this specific argument is feature parity with D3D on all the platforms it can compete on.
If it works on Windows, then I wonder if it really matters. I've seen a lot of games (e.g. Team Fortress 2) still offer multithreading as an option in the UI, so there's already two code paths there.
I have been told by driver vendors that GL multithreading does not work on windows, yes.
D3D multithreading works (even, to a lesser extent, with D3D9!), and this is one of the reasons why our D3D9 renderer is dramatically faster than our GL one - we can offload a subset of rendering work to helper threads instead of keeping it all locked on the thread that owns the window.
TF2/etc do offer a multithreaded rendering option, but IIRC on Windows their engine still uses D3D. Also, note that it's an option, because the feature used to be very unstable (still might be, actually) - I suspect people using the GL version of those games may have to disable it on certain hardware/driver configurations.
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What's cross platform? I guess what matters in this specific argument is feature parity with D3D on all the platforms it can compete on.
If it works on Windows, then I wonder if it really matters. I've seen a lot of games (e.g. Team Fortress 2) still offer multithreading as an option in the UI, so there's already two code paths there.
I have been told by driver vendors that GL multithreading does not work on windows, yes.
D3D multithreading works (even, to a lesser extent, with D3D9!), and this is one of the reasons why our D3D9 renderer is dramatically faster than our GL one - we can offload a subset of rendering work to helper threads instead of keeping it all locked on the thread that owns the window.
TF2/etc do offer a multithreaded rendering option, but IIRC on Windows their engine still uses D3D. Also, note that it's an option, because the feature used to be very unstable (still might be, actually) - I suspect people using the GL version of those games may have to disable it on certain hardware/driver configurations.