OpenGL: The Road Ahead
In addition to building the new Fahrenheit technologies SGI and
the OpenGL ARB will continue to make heavy investments in advancing OpenGL.
On March 9th 1998, the OpenGL ARB ratified the newest specification, OpenGL
1.2. The specification evolved with inputs from both ARB and interested
non-ARB parties. OpenGL's philosophy is to follow evolutionary trends in
hardware. As such, the process of enhancing OpenGL includes evaluating
OpenGL extensions and determining which ones are so widely used and
accepted that they should be incorporated into the core functionality of
OpenGL. In the OpenGL 1.2 Specification, eight extensions were brought into
the core.
SGI and the ARB expect to see OpenGL 1.2 implementations
available across a wide variety of platforms in Q4 '98.
Lastly, SGI and Microsoft are currently working on an OpenGL
ICD (Installable Client Driver) Device Driver Kit (DDK) for Windows 95/98
and Windows NT(R). This new driver kit will allow PC IHVs to easily create
quality, high-performance OpenGL hardware accelerators for the growing
number of OpenGL based graphics applications on the Windows platform. This
DDK will be available to graphics board and chip vendors in July 1998.