Last time, community forced Microsoft to support OpenGL in Vista. Is there any chance to start campaign to force Microsoft to support OpenGL 3.0 on upcoming Windows 7?
I’m surprised this misunderstanding holds 3 years after the fact.
With Vista, Microsoft intended to improve OpenGL support when you don’t have an ICD installed. Somehow, this was miscommunicated and we thought Microsoft was going to drop OpenGL support from Vista.
To clear up the confusion, Vista provides 3 ways to use OpenGL compared to 2 ways on XP:
- Microsoft’s GDI renderer (1.1)
- ICDs (1.1 - 3.0, depending on the driver and hardware).
- Microsoft’s DirectX wrapper (1.4, Vista only)
1 and 3 have always been available. 2 was added on Vista and will probably stay as is on Windows 7.
OpenGL 3.0 support is the responsibility of IHVs, not Microsoft.
yooyo: I’m using Windows 7 x64 with 8400M GS. No problems with OpenGL 3.0 - I can create GL3 context and render to it without any problems using latest drivers from Nvidia. Of course GL2 also works fine.
You surely mean “1 and 2 have always been available. 3 was added on Vista”.
[quote=“ZbuffeR”]
You surely mean “1 and 2 have always been available. 3 was added on Vista”. [/QUOTE]
Oops, I’ll fix my post. That’s what you get when posting after a party 
Edit: My first post is no longer editable…
Well, personally I think we’re long overdue for another stink fest. First we had the Vista Bowl; then we had GL3 Smackdown '08. Both were really quite lively, but what’s next? How about Windows 7: Extreme Frightening? I’m game.
No… im thinking of accessing OpenGL 3.0 features w/o using extensions loaders. Or at least to support OGL 2.0 w/o extensions loadedrs.
Then… creating OGL context on specific graphics card on multi graphics card setup… With D3D you can create device on specified graphics ard. With GL you are depends on driver and how it handling multi card setups. I belive this is reated to “unable to enumarate installed ICD drivers”.
So you want to make OpenGL program that can be executed only on Windows 7? What’s the point? Isn’t that DirectX 11 doing it already?
I see no problems with extension/core function loading mechanism. I can write OpenGL program that I can execute on XP, Vista or W7. You are suggesting to make it so that OGL3 program will be able to run only on W7.
Without extensions vendor support for GL would probably dry up quicker than a fish turd in a sand storm.
What improvement will you be making to OPengl 3.1 and is there an ETA for it.
I have had problems with the Nvidia 182.06 drivers on windows xp x64
it only supported on my system up to opengl 1.1. I had to go back to 174 release to fix this error.
Ok… I was wrong… sorry…
This would be very, very nice to have. As is, this seems to be possible under Linux and Windows D3D, but Windows OpenGL support is only available to Quadro graphics cards.
NVIDIA’s WGL_NV_gpu_affinity should be made available for consumer cards. Maybe AMD is looking to expose this for their consumer cards? There is a new extension, not documented: WGL_AMDX_gpu_association
Even better would be vendor-neutral support.
It was not at all clear during Vista development whether Microsoft would actually support the ICD model for OpenGL under Vista. In early development it definitely was not supported, and this is why there was a “big misunderstanding”.
Microsoft never announced that it would be dropping the ICD model.
It’s true that neither Ati nor Nvidia supported OpenGL with their first few preview drivers, but my impression (from their release notes) was that support would be coming at some later driver - as it happened. Interestingly enough, the same is happening with Windows 7 with current preview drivers not supporting OpenGL. This simply doesn’t mean that OpenGL support is being dropped!
“Windows 7 with current preview drivers not supporting OpenGL”
Then why does my OpenGL app run on Win7 absolutely flawlessly from day 1 (of the beta) ?
Let me guess, different drivers? 
I tested with Ati’s 8.12 preview release, which didn’t support OpenGL - now waiting for RC1 to try again.
Any caveats you have happened across? Last time (i.e. Vista), nvidia drivers had countless problems in the first 6-9 months, from invalid function pointers to wrongly positioned viewports and other fun stuff. Ati’s drivers worked more or less fine, miraculously enough (I think that was around the time of their new OpenGL implementation).
I don’t know about ATI drivers, but NVidia drivers completely support OpenGL on Windows 7. Had no problems with it on x64 w7, nor with games, nor my OpenGL soft. Also OpenGL 3.0 context works fine.
nVidia Geforce 8400 (Mobility). Works like a charm so far. Though it doesn’t surprise me, Win7 is supposed to work with all Vista drivers without modifications (of course that doesn’t guarantee anything).
Jan.
Unfortunately I missed the window of opportunity for the beta program. Guess I’ll be waiting for the movie… 
Windows 7 seems to have a lot of the same plumbing Vista does, so there shouldn’t be too many (unpleasant) surprises.