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Brian Paul to join Precision Insight

Posted by Hemos on from the fun-with-graphics dept.

physic writes "Brian Paul, the maintainer and original author of the free OpenGL library called Mesa. will be joining Precision Insight to work on Linux/Mesa fulltime. Mesa is best know to the linux gaming community as the library that allows Quake3 to run under linux on 3dfx, nVidia TNT2, and Matrox G200/400 video cards. "

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Mesa has also been important to Macs by webslacker · · Score: 3

    For a while, Mac users have been able to use PC Voodoo2 cards with their Macs thanks to Mesa (except for Diamond's MonsterII cards AFAIK). Being a Mac owner and wishing for better 3D than my Rage128, I can certainly appreciate the work these guys did.

  2. This isn't just Quake by Caballero · · Score: 3
    I also wanted to remind people that this isn't just about Quake. The work we're doing on OpenGL is about 3D graphics for Linux. Digital content creation, CAD/CAM/CAE, scientific visualization, medical imaging, and yes games.

    We showed Quake at SIGGRAPH because it was an easy thing to leave running as a demo, not because games are the only, or even the most important OpenGL application.

    - |Daryll

  3. OpenGL Conformance and Mesa by Oddhack · · Score: 4
    There's a common misconception being expressed in this thread. The conformance tests cannot be used to test an API or a collection of source code, because conformance is a property of the actual driver binary and hardware being used. It is highly unlikely that (for example) software Mesa, the Matrox driver based on Mesa, and the Nvidia driver based on Mesa will all have the same conformance test results. Thus it is literally impossible to say that "Mesa is conformant", only that a particular driver based on Mesa is conformant.

    That said, we did give Brian Paul access to the conformance tests for his own personal use, as an aid to improving Mesa.

    There will be a great deal of OpenGL activity on Linux in the next few months, from SGI as well as others. Stay tuned. BTW, if anyone is thinking about going to the Open Source / Open Science conference at Brookhaven National Lab in October, I'll be speaking on OpenGL and Linux there (mostly a status update aimed at researchers, though).

    Jon Leech
    OpenGL Core Engineering
    SGI