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Re: Notes on adding accelerated OpenGL support to Cygwin/X


On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:11:41AM -0600, Brian Ford wrote:
> 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.
 
Exactly. An ATI and nVidia do support later versions of OpenGL via this 
method.

> > 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.

Exactly again. It's not impossible though.

> > 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.

No, but as an option.

Alan.


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