NVIDIA Ships Beta Drivers for OpenGL v3 Standard
17 Aug, 2008Developers can explore the capabilities of the new cross-platform, 3D graphics specification.
Last week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, NVIDIA released beta drivers for the OpenGL v3 standard two days after the Khronos Group announced the new cross-platform, 3D graphics specification. The new drivers implement the OpenGL v3 API and the GLSL v1.3 shading language for both Windows XP and Windows Vista on selected GeForce and Quadro boards.
The company reports that these drivers enable developers to explore the capabilities of the new OpenGL v3 specification. NVIDIA will be releasing production drivers for OpenGL v3 as a part of its regular driver development program. More information and the drivers are available free of charge at the NVIDIA Web site.
The OpenGL specification provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms. An open, vendor-neutral standard, OpenGL is a widely used and supported programming interface and is available on major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group, and the new version introduces dozens of new features to increase the functionality, flexibility, and performance of the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. The new functionality includes vertex array objects, enhanced vertex buffer objects, 32-bit floating-point textures, render and depth buffers, new texture compression schemes, sRGB frame buffers, and an upgraded shading language. More information on the OpenGL v3. specification is at the Khronos Group Web site.
