[HoofHearted]

I can't believe this slipped by without a mention in the mac world. SGI (and all the OpenGL partners) announced the OpenGL2 spec on the 10th August.

Press Release here

The big new-ness is that shaders now don't have to be written for each chipset, developers can write them once and run them on any OpenGL2 spec card, whether it's ATI, NVidia, 3DLabs, whatever. There's a bit of buzz that it's development side might incorporate OOP, but that "uber-buffers" (whatever they are) didn't make the cut this time around.

Now although I find it interesting, I'm not terribly knowledgable on the subject. Sure this will effect games, but I was around for the entertaining early OSX threads on aqua, quartz and windowing and openGL 2 was mentioned as being a possble saviour (of course we now know that graphic card speed and ongoing osx optimisation meant those early troubles are largely redundant - who remembers OSX Public Beta running on iMac233s?).

Anyone care to comment on the implications of OpenGL 2 on OSX, Quartz, and Applications?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by HoofHearted:
Anyone care to comment on the implications of OpenGL 2 on OSX, Quartz, and Applications?

Not much until it's implemented, and that won't be until Tiger at least.

Even once that's done, keep in mind that as of right now, only the Quartz compositor takes advantage of the graphics card (through some extremely clever hacking on Apple's part); as far as that goes, OpenGL won't help anything. Apple would need to completely re-implement Quartz as a layer over OpenGL before there could be much change. They could do this, but now we're talking about a post-Tiger feature. We might see that in OSX 10.5, but even that is uncertain.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Not much until it's implemented, and that won't be until Tiger at least.

Even once that's done, keep in mind that as of right now, only the Quartz compositor takes advantage of the graphics card (through some extremely clever hacking on Apple's part); as far as that goes, OpenGL won't help anything. Apple would need to completely re-implement Quartz as a layer over OpenGL before there could be much change. They could do this, but now we're talking about a post-Tiger feature. We might see that in OSX 10.5, but even that is uncertain.

Hard to say. Quartz Extreme does work through OpenGL, and the naming and features of Quartz 2D Extreme suggest that it does as well (although I've found close to no info about what it actually does or how it works, so I could be way off).

[arekkusu]

GL 2.0 has pretty much zero impact on anything, other than marketing stickers.
GL revisions generally do not add any new functionality. All they do is officially require currently existing extensions. This is the life cycle of OpenGL-- individual companies (ATI, nvidia, HP, Sun, etc) develop an extension and use it in their products for a while. Then, if it makes sense, other companies add support for it. Then, if it turned out to be popular, it becomes official and is added to the GL core in the next revision (a year or two after the extension was invented.)

So saying you implement OpenGL 2.0 is the same thing as implementing OpenGL 1.5 plus a handful of extensions that have been around for a year. It's not really anything new.

That said, no currently shipping Mac hardware is going to be able to claim GL 2.0 support, because of the NPOT texture requirement. The GeForce 6800 is the only card available (not today, in a month maybe...) that can implement this.

And btw, we did cover this in this thread earlier this month.

Now, of course GL will improve in Tiger-- currently, Apple doesn't support some of the extensions that have been around for while on the PC side. GLSL and MRT are good examples. But that's separate from GL 2.0.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by arekkusu:

That said, no currently shipping Mac hardware is going to be able to claim GL 2.0 support, because of the NPOT texture requirement. The GeForce 6800 is the only card available (not today, in a month maybe...) that can implement this.

Seriously? I coulda sworn non power of two textures was the cutoff requirement for Quartz Extreme (I'm assuming that's what NPOT is, seems like a safe assumption).

[arekkusu]

Quartz Extreme uses rectangle textures which are available on the Radeon 7000, GeForce 2MX, or newer.

Rectangle textures are a subset of NPOT textures. You can read the specs for the details; in summary the full NPOT extension allows rectangle textures for 3D and cube maps, and lifts the wrapping and mipmap restrictions.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
Quartz Extreme uses rectangle textures which are available on the Radeon 7000, GeForce 2MX, or newer.

Rectangle textures are a subset of NPOT textures. You can read the specs for the details; in summary the full NPOT extension allows rectangle textures for 3D and cube maps, and lifts the wrapping and mipmap restrictions.

Ah, interesting. Thanks for the information. /me goes and reads