NVIDIA has released their final OpenGL 3.0 for Windows and Linux today. One vendor down, one to go (okay, 2 with Intel).
You are currently browsing Jean-François Roy’s articles.
The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 1.0 specification today, after an incredible effort to ratify a complex specification in a very short amount of time.
With all the major hardware vendors onboard, OpenCL has the potential to become the de-facto interface to access heterogeneous compute devices (be they GPUs or CPUs) on a wide variety of operating systems.
http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/the_khronos_group_releases_opencl_1.0_specification/
Grab your copy while it’s still warm: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/
Python is by far my high-level language of predilection. It has a comprehensive standard library that makes sense, powerful language features like generators and metaclasses, an outstanding collection of third-party modules and packages to extend its functionality, like SciPy, an equally impressive array of application frameworks to develop powerful applications, such as SQLAlchemy, Twisted and Django, and rich platform integration on Mac OS X with PyObjC 2.
Riven X 0.7d4 is now available. This release introduces preliminary fullscreen support, browsable journals and the journal inventory. See the release notes for more details.
Download Riven X 0.7d4 (5.1 MB).
Once again, the American people have shown what they’re made of by electing Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States. From an unlikely and modest beginning to a resounding 330+ electoral college votes victory, the Obama campaign, and the movement behind it, has inspired millions to become active in the political process once again and change the direction of this great country.
As a Canadian citizen, I was not involved in this generational transition, in this replacement of the old guard, in this repudiation of business and politics as usual. But I certainly supported it in every way I could and was excited by it, because so much of our world, let alone Canada, is tied to the United States, for better or worse.
I believe the Obama administration will have a tremendously positive impact in both internal affairs and international issues, not because Obama is a miracle man, but because he is an exceedingly intelligent and thoughtful man who seeks the advise of experts, not political pundits and ideologues, and strives to achieve concrete results over making a point. The fact that I strongly support his policies is simply because they make sense and are the right thing to do to make everybody better off, including American businesses.
In a way, this is more of a victory of pragmatism over ideology and demagoguery than a Democrats victory over Republicans. Indeed, the GOP has become the ideological party, and is now doomed to irrelevancy unless they reform themselves in profound ways.
So, from a Canadian living in California, tip of the hat to my American friends for doing yourselves and the world a huge favor.
NVIDIA released a new version of their beta ForceWare 180 drivers. There are 2 very interesting things about it worth mentioning.
First, it supports most of the OpenGL 3 ARB extensions, bringing some useful functionality such as vertex array objects (which first appeared on Mac OS X many years ago) and looser restrictions on framebuffer attachments with respect to their resolution.
However, the most exciting new feature is support for EXT_direct_state_access. That extension addresses a long-standing problem of the OpenGL API, namely state selectors. Indeed, there are quite a large number of functions in OpenGL whose behavior is affected by a number of state variables. For instance, the LoadMatrix* commands depend on the current matrix mode state. As the name suggest, EXT_direct_state_access adds a large number of new functions to OpenGL that explicitly take as an argument the object or piece of state to be modified, bypassing state selectors. This allows, for example, to load a texture matrix without changing the matrix mode first, or to change a texture parameter without binding that texture first.
As the EXT prefix suggests, this extensions is probably not likely to be adopted in the core specification in the next revision of OpenGL 3, but there’s a good chance it might be promoted to ARB, and integrated into core OpenGL by the 3.2 timeframe. This is pure speculation on my part, but this extension is something that a lot of people in the industry desire, so there should be momentum behind it.
GLee is my favorite OpenGL extension “manager” due to its simplicity (2 files to add to your project) and ease of use (just use one of the GLEE extension variables in an if statement, and function pointers are automatically bound).
NVIDIA has posted some OpenGL-related presentations from their recent NVISION 08 conference. I found the one on the GeForce 8 features and Cg particularly good with respect to introducing some modern OpenGL functionality and giving a sense of direction for the API.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvision08-opengl2.html
Also check out the NVSG presentation with has some OpenGL related content.
AMD has released ATI Catalyst™ 8.9, which includes a number of OpenGL 3 extensions:
- ARB_half_float_pixel
- ARB_draw_instanced
- ARB_instanced_arrays
- ARB_map_buffer_range
- EXT_texture_compression_3dc
- EXT_texture_compression_rgtc
- EXT_texture_compression_latc
- EXT_texture_shared_exponent
- EXT_depth_buffer_float
- EXT_gpu_shader4
The addition of the geometry instancing extensions and of gpu_shader4 (GLSL 1.20) is particularly significant, as they expose functionality that has been available since DirectX™ 9, and of course DirectX™ 10 features as well.
I just stumbled on this Google Code project which is categorizing and documenting OpenGL extensions. It should prove to be a very useful reference, check it out.