OpenGL is far from dead

WITH ALL the DirectX games hitting the market these days, you'd be forgiven for thinking that poor old OpenGL was as dead as a dodo.

But not so, according to SplashDamage, developers of upcoming FPS Quake Wars. In an interview with Nvidia's Roy 'The Boy' 'Terrific' Taylor, they let on that they think DX10 will get a run for its money.

There has been a complete lack of progress on the OpenGL featureset in the past couple of years, and Splash said that "Hopefully the Khronos group taking control will speed the process up again." Khronos took over the running of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board last Autumn and has managed to get chip-makers like Nvidia to open up DX10-esque hardware features in the OpenGL system. "The extension mechanism has also allowed manufacturers of high end cards to gracefully expose DirectX 10 features on Windows XP," Splash said.

So DX10 features on XP? Does this mean we could see a new wave of games coming out using OGL for maximum market exposure? "[OpenGL] is still the only viable 3D solution for cross-platform development on the PC," we are told, and that includes XP, Vista, Linux and OSX. But that said, it seems unlikely - SplashDamage, and iD Software (which owns the Quake brand) are really the only two major development studios still using OpenGL.

Cross-platform it may be, but Microsoft is putting enough dollars behind Vista that it won't matter in six months time. Indeed, it seems that OpenGL could soon be the stuff of graphics pros and nostalgic dev studios - if it isn't already.