Khronos Hopes for More Streamlined OpenGL 3.1

The Register
has a follow-up to the release of the OpenGL 3.0 specifications earlier this
week (thanks Mike Martinez), and the resulting hue and cry from folks unhappy with the
limited progress in the new version of the API (story). They
spoke with Neil Trevett, president of OpenGL proprietor Khronos Group and VP of
member company NVIDIA, who told them his consortium hopes to start the process
of streamlining OpenGL with version 3.1, saying that version 3.0 lays the
groundwork for this, adding his personal hopes that the new spec will be
released within six months. Here's a bit: Trevett said the re-write was
simply too much to engineer at the time. OpenGL is used in massive range of
scenarios and supported by AMD, Apple, Intel, Dolby, Ericsson, Panasonic, Nokia
and Symbian to name just a few of the 100 Khronos members.

Trevett reckoned that while people worked on the big goal of shrinking OpenGL
the delays this produced meant companies relying on the API had been unable to
take advantage of latest changes in hardware.

"Games are rebuilt every generation," Trevett said. "CAD programs can't have
stuff disappear at short notice."

He added that while OpenGL 3.0 isn't as streamlined as people were hoping it
would be, the deprecation mechanism is a step towards that bigger goal while
giving people in CAD a chance to find out what's going to disappear ahead of
time, and to prepare accordingly.


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