Announcement

**Himself** · 30 November 1999, 04:09

Uh huh. It always seemed rather obvious to me that OGL was a competing technology on Windows and that it wouldn't get real support from MS.

Just another reason not to upgrade to Win2K, right?

PS. SoapBox

**MoleDK** · 30 November 1999, 07:03

I thought that NT was used for demanding (professional) OpenGL rendering.

Seems it leaves these users to jump ship to Linux/Unix.

Too bad really, M$ is really shooting themselves in the foot. They have previously (if I am mistaken, please correct me) stated that W2K was not for Direct3D gaming, that's why they are shipping W2K Millenium.

------------------
Cya,
J.

"Unix can be a cynical Operating System for a person whos mind is limited to a Windows user interface"

System specs:
ASUS P2B-LS, P2-266, 128MB RAM, Matrox Millenium G200 (PD5.25), Nothing O/C.
Running Windows 98SE & Redhat Linux 6.1

**Pauly** · 30 November 1999, 08:21

OpenGL development has been effectively 'dead' on Windows since MS and SGI stopped developing their software implementations.

This news means that (AFAIK) the ICD method for OpenGL drivers is being scrapped in Win2000.

If anything this is good news. Okay, so Windows won't have OpenGL 'out of the box', but now developers won't have to worry about the silliness of the ICD model.

If they want to provide OpenGL support for Win2000, they just call their .dll opengl32.dll and put it somewhere in the application's path. Simple.

A problem would arise when some driver doesn't support a function in OpenGL - as there is no software driver to fall back on - thats much less of an issue these days, most cards worth their salt have a full OpenGL implementation. (Hmm, except my buggery G200 - no stencil buffer )

Like all Microsoft's decisions of late its just another political thing.

I remeber all those years ago when OpenGL was going to form the low-level section of Direct3D (kinda like D3D immeadiate mode is now). OpenGL had already proved itself on other platforms and was a nice API.
D3D would sit on top of OGL and provide scene graph type functions (much like D3D retained mode).

Doing this would have given videocard makers much longer to get their act together when it came to writing drivers for OpenGL.

I guess MS thought they could corner another section of the market :/

As for OpenGL and NT:
Direct3D h/w acceleration doesn't work under NT whereas OpenGL does - thats probably the only reason why OGL took off for NT.

------------------
Paul Groves.
-
http://home.clara.net/paulyg
OpenGL for Beginners

**Kruzin** · 30 November 1999, 15:17

Soapbox.
(I think this is the third thread on this topic that's been moved away from Matroxx Hardware now...)

**Goc** · 30 November 1999, 17:55

I think it isn't about Microsoft not giving support to OGl... This thing is clearly Linux-related... Methinks Microsoft has it's pants full

Announcement

Microsoft dropped OpenGL for W2K

Microsoft dropped OpenGL for W2K

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