I have just been reading the overview and I’m wondering whether there will be a software driver to fall back on?
Or to put another way; say for example, a company/individual wanted to create a version of pure 2.0 for something like a Palm (Someone has already created a lite OpenGL for it already, so it’s a possibility). Now, there wouldn’t be any hardware acceleration for the shaders; would it be possible to create software shaders?
I’ll assume that it would be possible, but slow; but, can I have some confirmation??
Its certainly possible to implement it all in software. How fast it’ll be is something different, especially the rasterization part (fragment shader and texture mapping) can be slow.
Originally posted by barthold:
[b]Its certainly possible to implement it all in software. How fast it’ll be is something different, especially the rasterization part (fragment shader and texture mapping) can be slow.
Barthold[/b]
That’s pretty good then. Any idea when it’s likely that the spec will be completed? I know that you’re still looking for input from other parties, but it’d be nice to have some sort of timeframe.
Also, would it be possible to have a list generated including the people/companies that have signed the “support” form? It’d b interesting to see who is going to support it.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Intel have a stab at this. They’ve got a fairly chunky research division whose only brief seems to be “go forth and do funky stuff that’ll eat CPU cycles like there’s no tomorrow”. For obvious reasons, but what the hey. Intel have also been involved in OpenML, which has close ties with the GL2 spec.
For Palm-level hardware though, no, I can’t see it. There’s no way it’ll run in realtime, and who does non-realtime rendering on a Palm?
Originally posted by Lucretia:
[b] That’s pretty good then. Any idea when it’s likely that the spec will be completed? I know that you’re still looking for input from other parties, but it’d be nice to have some sort of timeframe.
Luke.[/b]
We are aiming for a spec that is ready to be ratified by the ARB by Siggraph next year.