Differences between version 5 and revision by previous author of OpenGL.
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| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Monday, November 15, 2004 4:41:46 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Sunday, November 14, 2004 8:26:12 pm | by PeterHewett | Revert |
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
It is a rather low-level interface for programmers to draw polygons into the computer graphics hardware. However, the abstraction layer it provides means it is very portable. [OpenGL] had little mindshare of developers a few years ago when the other graphics [API]s included [Microsoft]'s Direct3D (part of DirectX) and 3dfx's Glide when one thing changed everything. That one thing was [Quake], when JohnCarmack's id software chose [OpenGL]. [Quake], combined with a Voodoo2 graphics card and the [OpenGL] drivers that came with it,
was irrestible.
-As far as [Linux] is concerned, [XFree86] has supported [OpenGL] pretty well since the 3.3.x series, and the newer 4.x series has great support. Mesa is a [Free] implementation of [OpenGL] in software. Some card manufacturers have release specifications that allow developers to write drivers to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Other manufacturers are not so cooperative, notably nVidia, and offer BinaryDriver~s, see NvidiaDriver
. See [Nvidia OpenGL Configuration mini-HOWTO | http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Nvidia-OpenGL-Configuration/] for specific details and some more background to how [OpenGL] works with [XFree86].
+As far as [Linux] is concerned, [XFree86] has supported [OpenGL] pretty well since the 3.3.x series, and the newer 4.x series has great support. Mesa is a [Free] implementation of [OpenGL] in software. Some card manufacturers have release specifications that allow developers to write drivers to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Other manufacturers are not so cooperative, notably nVidia, and offer BinaryDriver~s. See [Nvidia OpenGL Configuration mini-HOWTO | http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Nvidia-OpenGL-Configuration/] or our NvidiaDriverHowto
for specific details and some more background to how [OpenGL] works with [XFree86].
For anyone interested in programming using [OpenGL], [SDL] and [GLUT] are highly recommended. They save you a lot of time and energy learning the intracacies of your particular platform and make your program portable.
