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The State of OpenGL

Posted by michael on from the graphic-violence dept.

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."

3 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenGL is Dead by Xeo+024 · · Score: 5, Informative
    DirectX has won the war, with better features, performance, and availability.

    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.

  2. OpenGL 2 by woodhouse · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. On a related note.. by rkaa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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