[WinMac] This might interest some of the OpenGL users on this list

Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Mon, 29 Nov 1999 08:25:43 -0500

        This popped up on the AlphaNT list, and it's worth looking at if you use
OpenGL...

        Original source citation:

 <<http://www.theregister.co.uk/991129-000007.html>

>>>>

<excerpt>

From: "Jonas Gustavsson" <<jonas.gustavsson@mbox305.swipnet.se>

To: "AlphaNT Mail List" <<AlphaNT@alphant.com>

Subject: This might interest some of the GFX people on this list

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 13:58:25 +0100

I found this at the Register today, if it´s true I´m kinda happy to get
off the M$ merrygoround:

MS quietly dumps Windows OpenGL support

Fahrenheit, the joint Microsoft-SGI project "to define the future of
graphics" has crashed in ruins, with Microsoft to all intents and
purposes pulling its support for OpenGL and throwing its weight behind
Direct3D. The Register has obtained correspondence from the Win2k beta
tests which makes this abundantly clear, and last week SGI itself drew a
final line under its involvement with Fahrenheit.

In a terse note posted on the company site, SGI said: "We have decided to
reduce our involvement in all aspects of the Fahrenheit project, in line
with our decision to no longer make the IRIX version of Fahrenheit
available." Fahrenheit had originally been intended to create a suite of
APIs for DirectX on Windows and IRIX and to incorporate OpenGL. As the
two companies said at the time (December 1997): "Fahrenheit low-level API
will become the primary graphics API for both consumer and professional
applications on Windows. The Fahrenheit low-level API will evolve from
Direct3D, DirectDraw and OpenGL, while providing full backward
compatibility with applications and hardware device drivers written for
Microsoft Direct3D and functional compatibility with Silicon Graphics'
OpenGL technologies."

This is quite clearly no longer true. OpenGL support was pulled from the
Win2k beta some months back, prompting a series of problem reports from
testers who found OpenGL apps were running slow, and/or not working
properly. The responses from Microsoft staff do not entirely make the
actual position clear. One suggests that drivers for a particularly
graphics card were pulled because of source code issues, while another
says that "we are not supporting OGL until Direct3D is 100 per cent."
Which of course suggests that Microsoft support for OpenGL would crack on
ahead once Win2k went gold.

A later response clarifies matters further: "No driver that ships with
Win2k will contain OGL support... vendors will have to supply their own
post ship." All of this however fails to make clear the extent of
Microsoft's abandonment of OpenGL and the Fahrenheit project with SGI.
But in an email sent two weeks ago, Microsoft's Philip Taylor (senior in
MS Direct3D) states the position succinctly:

"Do not let your personal preference for the Quake family of games
dominate your understanding of this market. OGL is not strategic for
us... as the last three years of history in the multimedia space have
shown... SoftImage has about 20,000 seats total. And I just about had
them convinced to do a port to D3D before we sold them. Outside of the
Quake family of games there are, maybe, two hands-full of apps that use
OGL. Somewhere between 5-10 per cent. D3D has overwhelming support in
terms of titles, yet we have a serious lack of drivers. D3D drivers are
strategic for us."

And Fahrenheit seems to have been a crock, as Taylor tacitly admits: "Two
years ago we had a working OGL wrapper on top of D3D. we missed a window
of opportunity to provide this to the IHV community so they would
concentrate on D3D drivers. Six months ago we missed an opportunity to
make something out of the mess that is called Fahrenheit and turn
Fahrenheit low-level into a driver layer to host both the D3D and the OGL
runtime on... If we could come up with a plan to remove this bottleneck
and get to one graphics driver that would be a huge win."

Anyone interested in pursuing the dream of OpenGL as a standard on
Windows would do well to compare that last paragraph with SGI's sign-off
on Fahrenheit: "Any questions concerning the current status of, or future
plans for Fahrenheit should be directed to Microsoft."

Fahrenheit clearly does not have much of a home at Microsoft. As Taylor
puts it, the company is concentrating on "one graphics driver" (the
previous policy had envisaged Direct3D for games, with the addition of
OpenGL for high-end systems), and rather than pushing OpenGL as a
standard, Microsoft will just let the graphics vendors produce drivers
independently.

This is a spectacular turnaround from the initial Fahrenheit
announcement, and quite a reversal from SGI's position of a year ago,
when it trumpeted Fahrenheit's importance alongside the announcement of
its NT-based Visual Workstations. But the Microsoft alliance has clearly
not been to the company's advantage, and in announcing its ending of
support for IRIX Fahrenheit and a 'reduction' (you can't get much more
reduced than saying don't hassle us, call Microsoft instead) in its
overall involvement in the project, SGI indicated that the rift between
the two companies may have been Linux-related.

Said SGI: "The future key OS platforms for SGI will be IRIX and Linux and
to a lesser extent, [our italics] Windows... While it makes sense to have
Fahrenheit on all of SGI's strategic operating systems, it makes little
sense to have Fahrenheit on only IRIX and Windows. After much
deliberation, it was jointly decided that Fahrenheit could best continue
as a Windows OS-only product; thus Microsoft will continue the Fahrenheit
development process."

The other obvious alternative would of course have been for Microsoft to
co-operate in a Fahrenheit implementation for Linux, so the end result is
hardly surprising. ®

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