MS is going to botch OGL performance with Vista.

[JackAxe]

Well, I guess Sam's work will be switching to Linux or OS X because of this. :)

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/06/177251&tid=109&tid=152

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[SamuraiCatJB]

yeah, I heard about that at Siggraph too. I knew this was a possibility before. MS tried to drop support for OpenGL twice before. This is fairly common of MS in dealing with any competing industry. They tried to absorb it into Farhenheit, by turning all cross platform images into Direct3D and renaming it Farhenheit. When this failed, they dropped support on thier Windows 98/NT environments until hardware manufacturers brought back support unofficially. OpenGL drivers are controlled by the hardware manufacturers from 99 forward, so MS Windows does not support OpenGL, they simply do not deny it.

OpenGL via Direct3D was threatened (by MS) prior to XP release, and rumored at ME release. This has always been a controversy with Microsoft. This is one reason I wanted our software moved to fully cross-platform. Linux, OS X, Unix, or Windows. No one group could control the direction of the new design. However, I am not there yet, we need to prior to Vista approval as an OS by the US government or I could find myself rewriting for Direct3D.

What microsoft has done is provide a unified graphics interface from Windows to the driver (I forget what MS calls this, something like Windows Graphics Foundation). This means that 3rd party developers do not provide DLLs for compatibility, windows does. All programmers are communicating through the windows graphics interface then to 3rd party dll/hardware, not bypassing windows. This has been threatened before, it is just finally becoming reality.

[JackAxe]

Just dump support for Windows, don't rewrite for DX. :) MS, bleh. Hey, if their way was better, I would be all for it. But since their accomplishments are coated in mediocrity, then bleh with them, they don't deserve dominance.

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[SamuraiCatJB]

A little bit of good news. it seems this may only be for windowed OpenGL apps. Although that is frustrating, it means full-screen non-windowed games (like Doom series), are free to run 3rd party openGL drivers. So as long as 3rd party hardware manufacturers we should have full screen OpenGL programs running at full speed.

PowerPoint presentation from WinHEC 2005:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05007_WinHEC05.ppt

[Karim]

On a related note, the OpenGL 2.0 ES PlayStation 3 versus the WGF 2.0-based Xbox 360 will be an interesting metaphorical battle for these two graphics standards.