The company's latest driver releases are said to bring support for the new standard

Dec 18, 2008 10:54 GMT  ·  By

According to the latest news on the web, NVIDIA's GeForce 8 or later graphics cards along with some of the company's Quadro professional offerings will have full support for OpenGL 3.0 and version 1.3 of the OpenGL shading language (GLSL) enabled. The support for the standard comes with the company's latest driver releases available for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD.

The Santa Clara graphics manufacturer stated that through these drivers, developers would be able to “immediately begin using these drivers to build OpenGL 3.0 functionality into their software to give end-users new, superior graphics reproduction and visualization features.” As the news unveils, the official FAQ says that getting up and running with OpenGL 3.0 would involve using a fresh context creation call and that, if it wasn't used, the software would fall back to OpenGL 2.1.

The Khronos Group's OpenGL page can be consulted for more information on the OpenGL 3.0 standard. It seems that the latest version of the specs “adds many new features to OpenGLs advanced programmable pipeline and, while remaining fully backward-compatible with older versions, introduces a deprecation model for the first time.”

A great deal of today's game titles are written using Microsoft's DirectX, which means that OpenGL 3.0 is not expected to have too much of an impart on the gaming scene. Even so, the support for the new standard marks a step forward for the green company. As many of you already know, the graphics card manufacturer is promoting technologies able to leverage the gaming experience, such as PhysX.

NVIDIA stresses a lot on promoting its PhysX enabled graphics solutions, and sees the technology as the future in the gaming area, especially given the fact that there are many developers that share its point of view. On the other hand, its rival, ATI, is also promoting a similar technology, Havok, which, unlike PhysX, is not a proprietary standard.