3Dlabs Inc., a leading innovator in professional visual processing, today announced that it has released new drivers for its Wildcat VP family of professional graphics accelerators with a preliminary implementation of the new OpenGL Shading Language. 3Dlabs is the first company to ship an implementation that utilizes this high-level shading language, which was ratified recently by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board as official extensions to OpenGL and is expected to form the foundation of the upcoming OpenGL 2.0 standard. To encourage rapid multi-vendor adoption of the OpenGL Shading Language, 3Dlabs has released the front-end of the compiler used in its new drivers as open source, under licensing terms that enable royalty-free, commercial and non-commercial use. 3Dlabs is a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd.
The OpenGL Shading Language will enable new generations of programmable graphics devices, increasingly called Visual Processor Units, or VPUs, to be flexibly programmed for any task ? not limited to just 3D graphics. This is achieved by providing high-level, hardware-independent programmability for VPUs in a familiar C-like syntax with expressive power to code an almost unlimited variety of graphics, imaging and vector algorithms which can be directly compiled to VPU machine code ? providing enormous opportunities for hardware and compiler innovation. The new Wildcat VP drivers implement a subset of the OpenGL Shading Language that enables programmers to take full advantage of this first-generation programmable hardware. The 3Dlabs compiler source, the licensing terms, and new drivers for the Wildcat VP can be downloaded from this page.
The OpenGL Shading Language will enable new generations of programmable graphics devices, increasingly called Visual Processor Units, or VPUs, to be flexibly programmed for any task ? not limited to just 3D graphics. This is achieved by providing high-level, hardware-independent programmability for VPUs in a familiar C-like syntax with expressive power to code an almost unlimited variety of graphics, imaging and vector algorithms which can be directly compiled to VPU machine code ? providing enormous opportunities for hardware and compiler innovation. The new Wildcat VP drivers implement a subset of the OpenGL Shading Language that enables programmers to take full advantage of this first-generation programmable hardware. The 3Dlabs compiler source, the licensing terms, and new drivers for the Wildcat VP can be downloaded from this page.
