OpenGL
Jon Harrop
Does Mathematica 6 use OpenGL under Windows and, if so, is there any trouble
running it under Vista? What's the performance like?
I was under the impression that Microsoft were deprecating OpenGL on
Windows...
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
Chris Hill
>Does Mathematica 6 use OpenGL under Windows and, if so, is there any trouble
>running it under Vista? What's the performance like?
>
>I was under the impression that Microsoft were deprecating OpenGL on
>Windows...
Mathematica 6 on Windows is capable of using OpenGL, but normally
uses Direct3D. If Direct3D is unavailable, it will use OpenGL. The
goal is to make Mathematica "just work" on as many Windows machines
as possible without requiring users to update drivers. Mathematica 6
works well with Vista.
Microsoft hasn't been an advocate of OpenGL since approximately ten
years ago after the release of Windows NT 4. Windows does not ship
with accelerated OpenGL drivers in the box and the system software
renderer does not track updates to the OpenGL
specification. However, it turns out that so long as the driver
support is available in the OS to connect applications to the driver,
graphics hardware companies like ATI and NVIDIA can (and do) provide
modern, fully-functional, and high-performance implementations of
OpenGL as a part of their drivers.
Before the release of Vista there were indications that Microsoft was
going to remove support for OpenGL driver functionality when the new
Aero theme was turned on, which obviously would have been quite a
blow to OpenGL applications on Windows. With the release of Vista,
Microsoft did in fact update the OpenGL driver interface to allow
updated drivers to work with the Aero theme. In the end, from an
application developer perspective, Windows Vista remains roughly the
same as previous versions of Windows with respect to OpenGL support
(old software implementation, no accelerated drivers out of the box,
hardware manufacturers are providing OpenGL drivers).
For more technical information about OpenGL and Vista see:
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/
Chris Hill
Wolfram Research