What’s in a name change - FireGL to FirePro name change is more than cosmetic

The name change from FireGL to FirePro is more than just repackaging existing workstation cards with new names. The shift from "GL" to "Pro" reflects ATI's recognition and focus on high-end workstation cards for use in areas other than OpenGL 3D modeling and CAD. The hardware and drivers are still tuned for top OpenGL performance (check out the VBO demo and VBO performance test videos for CATIA), but they are also exposing capabilities for DirectX performance, GPGPU, Video, HPC, industrial design and game design.

So what are the new functions in OpenGL 3.0 you may ask?

OpenGL 3.0 increase the overall required set of functionality for any product advertising support for this latest spec revision. For instance:

• There is an improved mechanism to manage vertex buffer memory which enables applications to avoid costly back and forth through the PCIe bus, or to serialize CPU and GPU processing.
• Offscreen rendering capability is now a first class citizen, with an efficient mechanism to copy surfaces and use multi-sampled buffers, which should make rendering to shadow maps much more efficient.
• One of the key new feature is the support for the shader model available on all the recently released GPU, with full integer support. This lets application developpers write more natively their code instead of working around previous generation limited support for integer/float operations.

You can find the full list of new features and the latest OpenGL 3.0 specification at www.opengl.org. Full driver support will be available in the next few months from most hardware vendors and lot of large software companies have stated support for it in their next releases. Large subsets of the functionality is already exposed in currently shipping drivers, although the 3.0 logo will only by advertised once that becomes 100%.

As with most things in life, you will not know all the benefits until its been used in action in a bunch of applications. What I find quite interesting is that the standard has been set by companies in competition with each other. It takes relevant hardware, a modern API, but the most importantly it needs to be implemented in the application software to move forward the technology.

Good on you SGI - OpenGL sample implementation and GLX now truly free

In January 2008, it was discovered that licenses for the SGI OpenGL Sample Implementation and the GLX API / extensions that are at the heart of GNU/Linux 3D applications (GLX is the glue connecting OpenGL and the X Window System), were not actually free.  The original SGI Free License B and the GLX Public License were permissive, but contained terms which which were a significant problem for the free software community.  But SGI has come through and released a new version of the SGI Free Software License B, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org. Both Mesa and the X.org Project can continue to use this code in free software distributions of GNU/Linux.  This is great news for the open source 3D scientific, CAD and design communities.

FireGL team speaking at Siggraph 2008

The FireGL team will be speaking at a number of sessions on accelerated rendering, graphics and visualization at Siggraph 2008.

A 3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica

“Guernica” is the title of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, in which roughly 1600 people were killed. I saw this cubist-style painting when I visited Madrid in March of 2008.  It is a haunting, muted, mostly black and white painting that depicts the suffering and brutality of war.

Then this month, I came across German artist Lena Gieseke and her “3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica”.  It provides an unique and stunning perspective for viewing the painting in 3D. Definitely check out the Maya-rendered movie which takes you through the painting.