OpenGL 2.x and 3.0 APIs arrive this year

MY HONORABLE COLLEAGUE Wily Ferret posted some hefty and honest remarks on the state of OpenGL yesterday. Regardless of thenumber of hate e-mails monsieur Wily received, the truth is that OpenGL got stuck in too much politics, and DirectX just switched to a higher gear.

We can remember the times gamedevs were telling us, "DirectX? Us using it? Not in your wildest dreams." "Microsoft's puppet?" And so on and so forth, only to see them changing the tune when DX9 came along and became more a usable API than OpenGL. And now, DX titles are predominant on the market, even with the old-school gamedev teams.

But what is going on with OpenGL right now is nothing short of exciting. After all the mumble of OpenGL 2.0 and its delays, this year will see no less than two new versions of this venerable API. First one that is coming out soon is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x), which is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half of nothing else but stacking numerous extensions together.

This API is supposed to arrive in summer timeframe, most probably July. Approximately three months after that, Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. You've guessed it correctly, we are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL. Mount Evans is compatible with Longs Peak, but of course - you will require OpenGL 3.0 class hardware to run everything.

OpenGL 3.0 offers features such as instanced rendering, stream out of vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, numerous new texture formats and so on. What is most important here is that Khronos Group is linking OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a mobile 3D graphics API. This is done via Collada and glFX, so what is supported in OpenGL 3.0 will see the light of the day in ES version as well.

As far as OpenGL 3.0 goes, there isn't any bad news here, since this will be a first that a new revision of an API is supported top to bottom, from standard to most expensive ones and down to the 50-60 Euro range. Only problem? This shake-up of the API just might be too late, given the timeframe of next-generation titles. Then again, PlayStation 3 and Wii definitely do not use DirectX as programming interface. µ