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The State of OpenGL
CowboyRobot writes "No longer vapor, but a true 3D-embedded engine, OpenGL is on the move. Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime, and that desire has prompted the intended release of OpenGL 2.0, due in a few months. Khronos is now in charge of further extending OpenGL to cellphones and handheld gaming devices."
Pixlet is for playback (a codec), not for rendering films. Unless I'm missing something in your post.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
I don't know about availability, OpenGL is cross-platform (works on OS X, Linux, Windows, etc.) while DirectX is Windows only. OpenGL is also included with many if not all graphic cards. So it's just as widely available, if not more, than DirectX.
OpenGL 2.0 is not as exciting as the new major version number might indicate. Probably the most important new feature of OpenGL 2.0 was going to be the GLSL high level shader language. However, in order to speed up its support by hardware companies, this was instead put into OpenGL 1.5 spec when it was announced last year; GLSL already has implementations by 3DLabs, ATi and nVidia. OpenGL 2.0 will still add some useful new features, but it won't be the world-shattering event that 3DLabs promised in their original proposals.
Jan 16th 2002: SGI transfers 3D graphics patents to MS
Jul 09th 2002: Microsoft Claims IP Rights on Portions of OpenGL
Jul 11th 2002: 3D graphics world shaken by patent claims
Jul 13th 2002: Microsoft patent claims may affect OpenGL
Mar 3rd 2003: Microsoft quits OpenGL board
The original article post seems to confuse different forms of OpenGL. OpenGL|ES is the embeded stripped down OpenGL for mobile & embeded systems. OpenGL 2.0 is just a proposal from 3DLabs and may never get off the drawing board. Most of the significant changes that OpenGL 2.0 introduced have been implemented and released either as extensions or as part of OpenGL 1.5, so it's just not clear if or when OpenGL 2.0 will actually arrive, there's a lot of resistance because 2.0 intended to throw some stuff out and many developing, selling & using OpenGL implementations think that it's a REALLY bad idea to do that. With OpenGL|ES there is already a version 1.0 and you can actually get this in several forms from implementations that run on phones to wrappers around OpenGL that you can use on the desktop to emulate OpenGL|ES. OpenGL|ES is in the process of developing version 1.1 right now.
The notion that Pixar would use OpenGL for final rendering if only it were fast enough comes up every time a new video card or GL enhancement comes along just indicates how little people understand how Pixar actually makes their films. Oddly, Pixar really doesn't make this information much of a secret, and they'll even sell you the same software they use.
From coding experience the integration is pretty much non-existent or not very strong. APIs such as Direct3D and DirectSound have consistent API styles, but they don't share much API. It is possible to write an OpenGL application that uses DirectSound and DirectInput, like GLQuake.
Peercy and Olano (Click on "PDF" in the upper right)
Presentation
ASHLI
GPGPU
More than Moore's Law
Moore's law : still for wimps
Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.
OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.
Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?
Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?
And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?
Do you even remember PixelFlow from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.
Education is the silver bullet.