Why 3Dlabs is joined at the hip to RenderMonkey

A FEW DAYS BACK we wrote about 3Dlabs all of a sudden starting to like ATI RenderMonkey here, and now we have some details that might blow away the fog covering this rather interesting deal.

Nvidia is trying to get as much of the market as possible to use its own CG -- a nice approach to shaders but perhaps over Nvidia optimised.

And if you have been following how this situation is developing, 3Dlabs is well know as one of the strongest supported of the OpenGL 2.0 initiative.

This, of course, does not mean that 3Dlabs will abandon the shading language that is hidden inside OpenGl 2.0 since RenderMonkey is an artist tool and not a shading language.

Suddenly, 3Dlabs decided to take sides since CG is getting popular, and since Microsoft has plans to get developers, right under their noses, its shading language -- a part of DirectX 9, Higher Level Shading Language. Microsoft cannot be any more serious to make developers aware of its API and we're sure it will start a determined move in that direction.

Microsoft shows determination to get user to use only its tools and we can say that it did a good job with DirectX 9 and want to spread this to HLSL as well. Why would Microsoft want to let Nvidia take all the developers with its CG when HLSL is an alternative?

So this will soon lead into three different initiatives - APIs for shaders, Nvidia's CG, Microsoft's HLSL and OpenGL 2.0 that is still to be finalised.

Microsoft is not worried about RenderMonkey, a tool for artists that will use DirectX 9 compiler among upcoming OpenGL 2.0 compiler in a future parallel world.

Now when all have taken their sides, the real fight can start. µ