No OpenGL support in Windows2000 ??

Simon J. Rees sjrees at okstate.edu
Thu Dec 2 09:28:56 EST 1999


I realize this is slightly off-topic but it must have implications for vtk
developers and users.
I found the article below via another mailing list yesterday. Apparently
there will be no OpenGL support provided by MS in Windows2000 - at least in
the medium term.

The original article was posted on 11/29/99 and can be found at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991129-000007.html

Any reactions? Is there an "official view" as to Windows2000 support for
vtk?

-sjr

The article text  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fahrenheit, the joint Microsoft-SGI project "to define the future of
graphics" has crashed in ruins, with Microsoft to all intents and purposes
pulling its support for OpenGL and throwing its weight behind Direct3D. The
Register has obtained correspondence from the Win2k beta tests which makes
this abundantly clear, and last week SGI itself drew a final line under its
involvement with Fahrenheit.

In a terse note posted on the company site, SGI said: "We have decided to
reduce our involvement in all aspects of the Fahrenheit project, in line
with our decision to no longer make the IRIX version of Fahrenheit
available." Fahrenheit had originally been intended to create a suite of
APIs for DirectX on Windows and IRIX and to incorporate OpenGL. As the two
companies said at the time (December 1997): "Fahrenheit low-level API will
become the primary graphics API for both consumer and professional
applications on Windows. The Fahrenheit low-level API will evolve from
Direct3D, DirectDraw and OpenGL, while providing full backward compatibility
with applications and hardware device drivers written for Microsoft Direct3D
and functional compatibility with Silicon Graphics' OpenGL technologies."

This is quite clearly no longer true. OpenGL support was pulled from the
Win2k beta some months back, prompting a series of problem reports from
testers who found OpenGL apps were running slow and/or not working properly.
The responses from Microsoft staff do not entirely make the actual position
clear. One suggests that drivers for a particularly graphics card were
pulled because of source code issues, while another says that "we are not
supporting OGL until Direct3D is 100 per cent." Which of course suggests
that Microsoft support for OpenGL would crack on ahead once Win2k went gold.

A later response clarifies matters further: "No driver that ships with Win2k
will contain OGL support... vendors will have to supply their own post
ship." All of this however fails to make clear the extent of Microsoft's
abandonment of OpenGL and the Fahrenheit project with SGI. But in an email
sent two weeks ago, Microsoft's Philip Taylor (senior in MS Direct3D) states
the position succinctly:

"Do not let your personal preference for the Quake family of games dominate
your understanding of this market. OGL is not strategic for us... as the
last three years of history in the multimedia space have shown... SoftImage
has about 20,000 seats total. And I just about had them convinced to do a
port to D3D before we sold them. Outside of the Quake family of games there
are, maybe, two hands-full of apps that use OGL. Somewhere between 5-10 per
cent. D3D has overwhelming support in terms of titles, yet we have a serious
lack of drivers. D3D drivers are strategic for us."

And Fahrenheit seems to have been a crock, as Taylor tacitly admits: "Two
years ago we had a working OGL wrapper on top of D3D. we missed a window of
opportunity to provide this to the IHV community so they would concentrate
on D3D drivers. Six months ago we missed an opportunity to make something
out of the mess that is called Fahrenheit and turn Fahrenheit low-level into
a driver layer to host both the D3D and the OGL runtime on... If we could
come up with a plan to remove this bottleneck and get to one graphics driver
that would be a huge win."

Anyone interested in pursuing the dream of OpenGL as a standard on Windows
would do well to compare that last paragraph with SGI's sign-off on
Fahrenheit: "Any questions concerning the current status of, or future plans
for Fahrenheit should be directed to Microsoft."

Fahrenheit clearly does not have much of a home at Microsoft. As Taylor puts
it, the company is concentrating on "one graphics driver" (the previous
policy had envisaged Direct3D for games, with the addition of OpenGL for
high-end systems), and rather than pushing OpenGL as a standard, Microsoft
will just let the graphics vendors produce drivers independently.

This is a spectacular turnaround from the initial Fahrenheit announcement,
and quite a reversal from SGI's position of a year ago, when it trumpeted
Fahrenheit's importance alongside the announcement of its NT-based Visual
Workstations. But the Microsoft alliance has clearly not been to the
company's advantage, and in announcing its ending of support for IRIX
Fahrenheit and a 'reduction' (you can't get much more reduced than saying
don't hassle us, call Microsoft instead) in its overall involvement in the
project, SGI indicated that the rift between the two companies may have been
Linux-related.

Said SGI: "The future key OS platforms for SGI will be IRIX and Linux and to
a lesser extent, [our italics] Windows... While it makes sense to have
Fahrenheit on all of SGI's strategic operating systems, it makes little
sense to have Fahrenheit on only IRIX and Windows. After much deliberation,
it was jointly decided that Fahrenheit could best continue as a Windows
OS-only product; thus Microsoft will continue the Fahrenheit development
process."

The other obvious alternative would of course have been for Microsoft to
co-operate in a Fahrenheit implementation for Linux, so the end result is
hardly surprising.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the private VTK discussion list.  Please keep messages on-topic.
Check the FAQ at: <http://www.automatrix.com/cgi-bin/vtkfaq>
To UNSUBSCRIBE, send message body containing "unsubscribe vtkusers" to
<majordomo at gsao.med.ge.com>.  For help, send message body containing
"info vtkusers" to the same address.     Live long and prosper.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------




More information about the vtkusers mailing list