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I haven’t been active at all in the OpenGL circles recently but apparently OpenGL 3.1 was released yesterday. Check out the specs by clicking here at Khronos.ORG.

I have been extremely skeptical about OpenGL 3.0 since it was more like an OpenGL 2.2 and did not implement any of the promised object oriented features that competing APIs like Direct3D implement. Thankfully, this release of OpenGL 3.1 seems to be better at first glance as it not only deprecates but removes the old functionality which has been in the way for so long.

It looks like Khronos has heard and listened to its outraged end-users and finally created a better specification. At least, upon first glance, that’s what it looks like.

With the release of OpenGL 3.1 also comes a new version of GLSL, version 1.40. Most excitingly, NVIDIA has released OpenGL 3.1 drivers immediately after the release of GL, showing that they’re way ahead in the game already (as opposed to AMD or Intel).

It is amazing to me that no major outlets such as Slashdot have picked up this this story and one has to find out about 3.1 by accident or RSS feeds.

It’s been a while since I posted but this one will make up for it. A messy screenshot of NVIDIA’s 2008 timeline has emerged on Chilehardware (CHW) and reveals that OpenGL 3.0 drivers/implementation will be due in September of this year in a collection called Big Bang II (Big Bang I was SLI).

CHW member KaiserGerhardI has provided a deciphering of the screenshot which provides more information on the contents of the screenshot:

• First: Quad ?????? Release February
• Hybrid Shipped Spring
• Spring Notebook Cycle
• GT200 + ????
• Big Bang II-Fall Will Focus on
  • Now/WWW features
  • SLI connectivity features
  • Display connectivity
  • Quality improvements
  • Performance improvements
  • OpenGL 3.0

The words which could not be deciphered are marked with question marks. What this means for OpenGL enthusiasts and developers is that we won’t have to attend SIGGRAPH, NVISION or any other meeting for that matter, since this is basically a confirmation on its own.

Now, let’s hope that ATI will also provide an implementation this soon.

NVIDIA officially announced its new line of GPUs today on their website. Two models from the line have been announced, namely the GTX 260 and the GTX 280.

NVIDIA claims that the cards have a 50% performance increase over the Geforce 8800 Ulltra (figures anyone?). Below are some highlighted specs for the high-end GTX 280:

I’d love to see a benchmark done on this puppy.

This weekend I took some time out to reformat my development computer in preparation for Windows Vista. I used Vista before but switched back to XP x64 in less than a week’s time. But heck, after a year and a Service Pack, I was willing to take the chance with Vista.

I wanted to take advantage of the DirectX 10 features Vista exposes since they’re not available on XP but was kind of disappointed with the performance of the API in Vista. It seems to me that the samples provided in the DirectX SDK simply run much slower than on XP.

Granted, I bought the most budget oriented GPU that supports DX10 (Geforce 8500GT 512VRAM) but that was simply because of the reason that I want my projects to be able to run on the lowest budget hardware possible while still being able to access DX10-like features. Dell, in fact, offers the 8400 on their laptops and budget desktop PCs, which is a fair share of the market and should be targeted.

Vista itself seems pretty solid so far; it certainly responds better than a year ago and supports all of my hardware and development tools (VS 2008, AQTime, Intel C++ compiler, etc). The big test will be OpenGL: Will it also have performance drops or stay the same? I’ll see tonight.

As you might know, NVIDIA has recently purchased Ageia, makers of the PhysX real-time physics SDK. Since then, NVIDIA has taken over the development of the SDK and a new version of the SDK is now available for free in binary form from the NVIDIA website, click here to go to check it out. A special license for the source code version of the SDK can be acquired for a mere $50K.

In other NVIDIA news: two new free book releases are now available on the NVIDIA website, namely: The Cg Tutorial and GPU Gems 2 which are two incredibly useful books. NVIDIA is on a roll, and looking at the manner in which freebies are coming in lately, I’ll be the last one to stop ‘em.

NVIDIA has decided to publish the acclaimed GPU Gems book on their website, free of charge. Go to the NVIDIA website to read it. Did I mention it was free? Its free.