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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."
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.
/* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }
but we can't have more trolls on this post (2) than actual posts (1), now can we?
Other than that, open standards are good. (Score: 0, Redundant)
OpenGL ES is just that; OpenGL with some sections taken out and a few additions to make software-only rendering and math go faster.
It's nice to point out that we had Quake, etc. on machines with lesser capabilities, however those never were able to get sufficient performance through general use APIs. They weren't ported to OpenGL before we had hardware acceleration on the PC.
With OpenGL ES, however, it's now completely feasible to make a Quake equivalent for the faster PDAs without custom rendering code. This will happen well before we have mobile 3D hardware acceleration. Bring on the Bluetooth Deathmatch! :-)
Jouni
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
... but it'd be nice if they covered input, sound, and networking like DirectX does. Arguably that'd make porting games to Linux much easier. Plus, it'd give developers an alternative to DirectX that's more portable.
Just a thought, but I don't expect to get a lot of attention for it because I'm hinting that MS did something right.
"Derp de derp."
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
While the name OpenGL is owned by SGI (since OpenGL was invented at SGI), OpenGL itself is managed by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Resource Board).
From OpenGL.org:
The OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB), an independent consortium formed in 1992, governs the OpenGL specification. Composed of members from many of the industry's leading graphics vendors, the ARB defines conformance tests and approves OpenGL enhancements. Currently the board includes representatives from 3DLabs, ATI, Compaq, Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NVidia, Microsoft, and SGI.
I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft has recently pulled out of the OpenGL ARB.