OpenGL 2.0 White Papers

Timothy J. Wood writes "3DLabs has posted a series of white papers on OpenGL 2.0 covering topics such as improving parallelism, timing control, minimizing data movement programmable pixel pack and unpack and (most notably) a proposal for a hardware independent shading language."

Comments

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

(a) mainframes are still around. If anything they're experiencing massive growth, thanks to IBM remarketing them as ultra-reliable linux virtual server solutions.

(b) As a mechanical engineer and computational fluid dynamicist, I assure you, the workstations are not "dominated by windows" - most people are still on SGIs, and the majority of those that aren't are moving to Linux, not Windows NT, under the advice of the application vendors, who find supporting their apps on linux much less of a pain than on WinNT.

Unix Clusters aren't going away either. Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do. Depending on the application, there's a spectrum of cost/performance solutions that may be worthwhile - if you're simulating a nuclear explosion, and CPUs get more powerful, you don't necessarily downsize, you might make the simulation more accurate by using roughly the same amount of computers to do much more. Human's AREN'T able to simulate the physical world with complete accuracy - but the more calculations, the better (assuming perfect programming), at least until you hit quantum limits, and then it takes EVEN MORE power to do probabilistic predictions via monte-carlo or sum-over-histories....