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

[Brian Ford <ford at vss dot fsi dot com>]

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