Open GL has been a favorite for high-end graphics rendering for years, but now it is being tweaked to run on everything from supercomputers to cell phones. The changes could make game development easier, animation faster, and fundamentally change the face of high-end graphics.

OpenGL is the dominant cross-platform application-programming interface (API) for building interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. It includes a rich set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and visualization functions, but the original OpenGL is essentially a closed set of features.

To remedy this, SGI has also released a programmable version of OpenGL, the Open GL Shading Language (a.k.a. OpenGL 2.0) expected in just a few months will also include programmable features. When Open GL 2.0 ships in a few months, it goes a long way toward making graphics hardware programmable. As graphics processors have become more advanced, they can be treated much like a conventional CPU. OpenGL 2.0 will enable developers to program graphics in an environment very similar to C to customize graphics performance on the fly.

Graphics performance has always been limited by the enormous amount of computing power required to handle advanced 3D graphics. But now that GPU performance has increased, there is room to give programmers some more flexibility when creating graphics programs. This means that game developers can explicitly manipulate vertex and fragment processing to maximize performance within their software.

It will also enable vendors to tune their software to specific hardware configurations. OpenGL 2.0 drivers will ship with built-in compilers that will load source code and compile it directly to fit a specific workstation configuration. This direct-compile system could, for example, get the best possible performance out of an Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphic card by compiling itself specifically for that card.

OpenGL 2.0 will be more than just an extension to OpenGL 1.4, according to Dr. Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research, and publisher of Tech Watch, it is a breakthrough design that will greatly expand programmability and scalability. "OpenGL has been the backbone of the graphics industry since 1992 and has always set the standard for graphics performance."

The hope is that by adding programmability to graphics chips, compute-intensive tasks could be greatly improved. The vast offline render farms that currently render firms like Finding Nemo, could be done in real time on a much smaller number of workstations.

Although it was first launched by SGI in 1992 for high-end graphics only, OpenGL has maintained a loyal following in the professional graphics industry. On the desktop, OpenGL is has been getting a great deal of competition from Microsoft's DirectX and Direct3D (D3D.) Direct3D provides calls to access the frame buffer and advanced features of the display adapter, which are not provided in the standard Windows GDI graphics interface. Microsoft released it first DirectX API in 1995 with the hope that it would encourage game developers to write 3D games for the Windows platform. Since then the company has continually improved the Direct X API.