appleinsider.com — A new implementation of the OpenGL industry-standard interface for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D applications could offer as much as a twofold increase in performance when running under Apple's forthcoming Leopard operating system.
Oct 24, 2006 View in Crawl 4
mooniniteOct 25, 2006
Did you know nVidia's Linux driver already provides OpenGL 2.1 support? *gasp*
vezquexOct 25, 2006
didn't read.hmmmmm... Leopard is coming out in the future, when better processors and video cards will be out, which will increase performance. I think we should give credit where credit is due; thank you Intel, AMD, and nVidia.
silviu_lucianOct 25, 2006
Well have you considered that Microsoft is pushing their own ''Graphic Library'' -- DirectX. Mind you DirectX 9.0 is a pretty darn good framework and it's seeing massive support from graphic card manufacturers.It's only a difference in views here, one could choose OpenGL over DirectX and vice-versa just as well as one would choose Intel over AMD, Pepsi over CocaCola, cocaine over heroin ... uuummm ... I'll stop now
maurymarkowitzOct 25, 2006
No no no!The reason the new driver speeds up OGL is because it offloads _emulated_ calls to the second core. So if you're using a "real" graphics card you're likely to see only a small boost in performance, the tiny time that it takes to marshal data from/into OGL/card native formats. That's the dull end of the stick. So when people say that nVidia's Linux driver does this and only gives you a small boost in performance, well, that's just what I expect.But if you have an integrated graphics solution (read: crap) then there's a WHOLE LOT of stuff going on on the processor side. Really expensive things, like triangle setup and geometry mashing. All the "card" is doing in these cases is putting on the textures and stuff like that, very DX6-ish, pre-T&L. On those machines I do expect the new driver will completely kick ass, and a doubling in performance doesn't strike me as at all unbelievable.Now that said, I have a Mac Pro and it's already using this new driver. Halo and WoW, the main 3D games I play, both run much faster on my new Mac than my old PC. My old PC was a real HP with a 2.8 GHz HT CPU and a gig of ram, which was running on a nVidia 7600 driving 1280 x 1024. The new Mac has 2 x 2.66 GHz CPUs with a gig of slower RAM and a X1900 driving 2560 x 1600. And it's much faster. MUCH. I get zero frame drops even in the infamous mess hall scene in Halo... while watching a DVD in another window and dowloading a 450 MB WoW patch (I had to try it, I mean it has four cores in it, you gotta wonder how far you can push the thing!).So maybe some of that has to do with the new OGL. If it does, kudos to Apple.Maury
cyberskullOct 25, 2006
Sounds great. I got a good performance boost when I switched from Panther to Tiger, so I believe it. :)