Friday, November 18th, 2005, 5:00 pm
Windows Vista Penalises OpenGL
POV-Ray – The Kitchen by Jaime Vives Piqueres
recently wrote about Microsoft’s attempt to gently push away any technology that is not theirs. Among my list laid OpenGL and DirectX, which is a Microsoft ‘tool’ for putting an end to interoperable 3-D rendering (frequently gaming) in favour of proprietary. The added value is zilch. It is merely required to re-inforce the shackles of a monopoly.
I kindly advise that you sign the petition to stop this from happening. At present, OpenGL support is discouraged in Windows Vista, which looks grim for a world where interoperability prevails.
In the current implementation (as of 2005-09-22) of the OpenGL graphics library in Windows Vista – a soon to be released new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, OpenGL is not a stand alone library. Instead it functions as a wrapper around DirectX, and is frozen to the vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4.
This means that OpenGL applications in Windows Vista will, most likely, suffer from severe performance loss, that, when an OpenGL driver is loaded, the Windows operating system will have odd behaviours and that future versions of OpenGL will not affect the Windows Vista platform. This would result in less developers actively supporting OpenGL, and as a result, less applications written which are easy to port to another platform or easy to maintain.