On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Alan Hourihane wrote: > One note Harold on this.... > > You'll find that a lot of OpenGL drivers that are used on Windows are > seriously lagging behind in support for the hardware. That's because > a lot of vendors don't bother updating support for OpenGL directly > and are more interested in Direct3D. > That is probably because Microsoft does the same. They only ship/support OpenGL 1.1. Everything else is an extension that needs to be loaded manually via GetProcAddress.
> Just run a native 'glinfo' application and you'll see that ATI and nVidia > are pretty good in this area and provide very up-to-date OpenGL drivers. > But others aren't so great. > But, you still have to jump through the GetProcAddress hoops to get there, even with ATI and nVidia because of the base layer that Microsoft provides. > Apparently SciTech (Kendall Bennett) donated some code (a driver) for Mesa > that allows it to accept the OpenGL commands from the client and call > the equivalent Direct3D counterparts thus providing hardware that has > a more capable Direct3D layer much more benefit. > > I think Karl Schultz on the Mesa list has the code and is integrating it, > but I don't know the status. You may want to contact him. > > You won't need this to get started though, but it's certainly worth > investigating once you've got an initial implementation. > This would be a good option to have, but I wouldn't make it exclusive. -- Brian Ford Senior Realtime Software Engineer VITAL - Visual Simulation Systems FlightSafety International Phone: 314-551-8460 Fax: 314-551-8444
