“The broad industry support Apple is building around OpenCL will help increase the critical mass behind OpenGL, the 2D and 3D graphics language Apple uses extensively in Mac OS X,” Prince McLean reports for AppleInsider.
“Since the mid 90s, Microsoft has worked to prevent the adoption of OpenGL as an interoperable industry standard in favor of its own proprietary DirectX portfolio of graphics software and gaming tools,” McLean reports. “Microsoft’s DirectX strategy was originally intended to push DOS game developers to Windows; it has since served to tie PC gaming to Windows, as DirectX is only available on Windows. Successive versions of DirectX have also been used to push developers to the latest version of Windows; for example, the latest version 10 was intended to result in a crop of Vista-only games that would boost Vista sales. However, this did not work out as intended, as the slow uptake of Vista prevented any real market for DirectX 10 games from developing, leaving PC games to target Windows XP instead.”
“OpenGL is now more competitive with DirectX than ever. Microsoft’s stumble with Vista and its DirectX/Direct3D version 10 has also helped to stall its momentum in the market. Microsoft plans to add OpenCL-like support for GPGPU computing into DirectX 11 in Windows 7, but Apple’s OpenCL, which is designed to work closely with OpenGL code, will arrive first and with broad industry support. Apple has also released OpenCL as a royalty-free, open standard anyone can implement on any platform,” McLean reports.
Full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]