Wave Issue 9706 3/28/97 Article 3-01

***OpenGL's Growing Support
by John Latta

SGI has announced a number of new OpenGL level 3 licensees for the PC.
These include: Number Nine Visual Technology, ELSA Gmbh, Compaq, 3Dfx
Interactive, Rendition, and Interdimension Multimedia. In addition,
several companies are upgrading their licenses, including Intel and
AccelGraphics. There are currently more than 50 OpenGL licensees.

SGI also disclosed the results of its on going efforts to better tune
CosmoGL for Windows. SGI has been focusing on improving the performance
of CosmoGL for the Windows platform and early results were seen last
year at SIGGRAPH '96. Early on SGI's efforts were focused on tuning the
code for software only rendering, however, as the effort progressed
this became an effort to improve both the geometry engine and
rasterizer sections of the code.

SGI did state that the current version of CosmoGL for Windows does not
support multi-threading. This is of interest on the Windows NT platform
where it would be possible to optimize the use of multiple processors
for various functions in the image generation pipeline and thus use
additional processors for the geometry engine.

The results of their current CosmoGL work have now been provided to
Microsoft. SGI hopes that this will be considered for incorporation
into both the next release of Windows 95, code named Memphis, and
Windows NT 5.0. SGI sees their efforts on OpenGL being complementary
with the OpenGL integration activities at Microsoft.

www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/index.html