Last summer at Siggraph 2010, I won 2 licenses for gDEBugger (one GL and one CL...) answering Trivia questions at OpenGL and OpenCL BOFs. A while after, I got my license but gDEBugger licenses are attached to a specific platform and I was on an ongoing process to upgrade my computer with a new CPU and motherboard. About a month ago, I contacted Graphic Remedy to get my license updated for my new platform as I made sure with them I could do earlier. No answer and actually still none… Actually, gDEBugger wasn’t on sale anymore. It’s finally today that I discovered why: gDEBugger is now free of use! This raise the question on how Graphic Remedy is going to finance itself in the future and I expect an official statement anytime soon and hopefully good news.
gDEBugger is an OpenGL and OpenCL debugging and profiling program. It is the Open*L counter part of Direct3D's Pix but probably much more confidential as it was extremely expensive so that many people actually prefered glslDevil, a free alternative not without advantages especially on the regard of GLSL step by step debugging. gDEBugger allows breaking an OpenGL program execution, visualisation of the framebuffer, the textures, the buffers values but also realtime editing and rebuild of GLSL programs. To tune the performances, gDEBugger makes easier finding bottlenecks by interactively enable and disable draw calls, raster operations, textures fetches or GLSL program stages.
It is available on Windows, Linux and MacOS X but it only supports OpenGL 3.2, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenCL is still in beta.
Next move for OpenGL? Obviously, gDEBugger has to catch up with the lastest OpenGL 4.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 and finalizes OpenCL support but this is just a piece (a master piece) in the developer environment. More OpenGL specification improvements, more OpenGL drivers improvements, more documentation and more and better tools are still required.
A perfectly elaborated Chess game strategy, moving toward modern OpenGL programming for OpenGL everywhere for everyone.