NVIDIA Unveils First OpenGL 3.0 Drivers

[MAC]

I'm a little late with this one, but NVIDIA has unveiled the first OpenGL 3.0 beta drivers:

SIGGRAPH, LOS ANGELES, CA—August 14, 2008—Yesterday, just two days after the Khronos Group announced the new OpenGL® 3.0 standard, NVIDIA Corporation released beta drivers for the cross-platform, 3D graphics standard. The new drivers implement the OpenGL 3.0 API and the GLSL 1.30 shading language for both Windows XP and Windows Vista on selected GeForce® and Quadro® boards. With these drivers any developer can now explore the capabilities of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification. NVIDIA will be releasing production drivers for OpenGL 3.0 as a part of its regular driver development program. More information and the drivers are available free of charge at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html.

The OpenGL specification provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms. An open, vendor-neutral standard, OpenGL is the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

“OpenGL 3.0 is a significant advance for graphics standard and we’re proud that NVIDIA has played a major role in developing it,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, Manager, Core OpenGL Software at NVIDIA and chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. “OpenGL 3.0 will be a first-class API on both GeForce and Quadro boards. Shipping drivers two days after this new specification is released demonstrates our strong commitment to the OpenGL developer community and our partners who rely on the standard.”

OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group and the new 3.0 version introduces dozens of new features to increase the functionality, flexibility, and performance of the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. The new functionality includes: vertex array objects, enhanced vertex buffer objects, 32-bit floating-point textures, render and depth buffers, new texture compression schemes, sRGB frame buffers, and an upgraded shading language. More information on the OpenGL 3.0 specification is at http://www.khronos.org/opengl/.

Press Release.

[DarKStar]

Useless if you ask me - I have yet to see any development of new OpenGL3 let aloen OpenGL2 based games - Most game developers now are console exclusive - most of the shit you see on PC are console ports - so why is NVIDIA wasting resources and money on OpenGL, I don't see any future for OGL anyways, doubt that any game developer will use it, because of the console thing.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by DarKStar

Useless if you ask me - I have yet to see any development of new OpenGL3 let aloen OpenGL2 based games - Most game developers now are console exclusive - most of the shit you see on PC are console ports - so why is NVIDIA wasting resources and money on OpenGL, I don't see any future for OGL anyways, doubt that any game developer will use it, because of the console thing.

You don't see much for OpenGL because the market wants DirectX :P

[DarKStar]

Originally Posted by enaberif

You don't see much for OpenGL because the market wants DirectX :P

Exactly - and because of consoles and games being mostly console ports, I guess we can forget about OpenGL 3 games LOL

Maybe this meant more for graphic applications....

I'm using this driver, it's the 177.89, in order to enable OpenGL3 you have to get a utility called NVEMULATE and set the OGL 3 option to enable - the driver runs great, I have it running with PhysX 8.08 (which you need to isntall manually) - OpenGL will still show as 2.1 in diag tools, but that's normal.