Open GL

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...811130718.html

Open GL 2


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Ed Light

Smiley :-/
MS Smiley :-\

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Thanks, robots.

Vey cool. Just hope some game companies pick it up.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...811130718.html

Open GL 2

Since it's an interface standard, it _does_ need to be "universally
updated by an all-encompassing body" or you end up with a hundred
different mutually incompatible versions of it.
A GPU manufacturer can add extensions to OGL which allow their fancy
features to be utilised immediately. The Open GL ARB ( Architecture
Review Board ) may adopt it and make it an official ARB extension or
incorporate it into later revision. The current version of the OGL is
1.5. It incorporates the OpenGL Shader Language ARB extensions, which in
the next version of OpenGL, 2.0( the spec was ratified last week ) will
be a necessary feature of OGL.

OpenGL isn't free. M$ licensed it for use on Windows from SGI back in
the early NT days when they didn't have any 3d graphics API and they
were one of the founder member of the ARB. Linux has an open source
alternative called Mesa3D which has the exact same function calls and
parameters which is 100% compatible with it, which is why Doom III will
run on it when the Linux installer comes along. There is a Mesa3D
implementation for many OSs for free. However, under Windows 'tis not
hardware accelerated, but its software rendering is much faster than
Windows.

The big advantage of OpenGL is:

a) It's easier to code for.
b) 'tis cross platform. It'll work on Macs, Linux PC, Windows, and high
end hardware, so porting graphics engines between platforms is very very
easy.
c) The driver architecture ( Installable Client Driver ) allowed all its
components to be hardware accelerated. Which is why when the geforce 1
came out any game which already used the OpenGL API calls for TnL would
automatically benefit from the hardware acceleration ( but no games did
since they relied on the alternative 3dfx mini-Driver acceleration
architecture which only accelerated texture mapping/rasterization. Also
because the opengl32.dll software fallback file supplied by M$ had a
very very crap software emulation of the core OGL V1.1 functionality, so
Quake 2 used its own TnL routines. In fact if you run any opengl app in
a 256 colour mode ( if they supporting running in such a mode ), you'll
notice how totally crap and slow mo the graphics are even on multi GHz
CPUs ( cos very few GPUs accelerate OGL in 256 colour modes) .

M$ last year resigned from the OGL ARB, indicating that it wanted
nothing more to do with it ( DX 9 being superior to it ). Windows XP's
Windows update drivers never accelerated OpenGL unless you got GPU
drivers from the card manufacturer's website. They embraced it initially
because they had nothing better. Now they'd like to be rid of it and
impose their own standard. They always wanted to impose their own
standards ( the original DX being based on the Windows '95 gaming
technology of a company M$ had bought ) and there was a huge war with
john Carmack supporting OpenGl after trying both APIs and a lot of
mudslinging and M$ was forced to release OGL support for Windows '95
with a patch.

OpenGl is used by professional CAD/CAM apps

My two cents.