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#41
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http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...811130718.html
Open GL 2 -- Ed Light Smiley :-/ MS Smiley :-\ Send spam to the FTC at Thanks, robots. |
#42
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Vey cool. Just hope some game companies pick it up.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...811130718.html Open GL 2 |
#43
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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. |
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