Khronos Releases OpenGL ES Graphics Standard

An anonymous reader writes "The Khronos Group announced today that it has ratified the OpenGL ES 1.0 royalty-free open standard for advanced 2D and 3D graphics in embedded systems including mobile and handheld devices, and that the API specification is now available for free download. OpenGL ES defines subset profiles of OpenGL; OpenGL and OpenGL ES are royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. OpenGL ES 1.0 is said to run in software implementations as small as 50Kbytes, and can enable hardware graphics pipeline acceleration on both fixed point and floating point systems."

Comments

Interesting Specs

[mcdrewski42]

The embedded space varies widely, ranging from 400Mhz PDAs with 64MB RAM to 50MHz mobile phones with 1 MB RAM.

It constantly surprises me how powerful the systems are that are defined as 'embedded'. After all, the minimum spec for DOOM is a
386 processor operating at a minimum of 33MHz and for Quake it's an Intel Pentium(R) 75 MHz processor or better.

That's now in 'embedded systems' sizing easily.

Should be matched with software

[mnmn]

Now its all fine and dandy to have Fujitsu and GeforceFX GO chips on embedded devices and their OpenGL API, but there must be a smooth way to use pre-existing software with this API. Most software would expect a complete OpenGL 1.1 to 1.4 implementation running on standard OSes like (uC)Linux, NetBSD and (someone correct me on this) QNX, Symbian and the rest. Such an OpenGL implementation should be released for most of the embedded 3d chips for all these OSes, possibly as extensions of Mesa under the free OSes, before it can be used at all. We cant expect to see many applications made for custom OSes running on custom cpu/3d chips using a custom OpenGL (ES)implementation. The importance of pre-existing software base for any platform is paramount.