SGI to license 8 for OpenGL

Electronic News, March 24, 1997 by Andrew MacLellan

San Jose, Calif.--Citing "a groundswell of support," Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) today will issue eight licenses to chip, board and systems companies, including Intel, in an effort to reassert its OpenGL application programming interface (API) as an industry standard for high-level graphics applications in the face of competition from Microsoft's Direct3D software interface.

Electronic News has learned the new Level 3 OpenGL licensees include Compaq Computer, board makers Number Nine Visual Technologies and ELSA GmbH, as well as Windows NT/95 software driver house InterDimension and 3-D chip companies 3Dfx Interactive and Rendition.

Intel and board vendor AccelGraphics, both of which were OpenGL consumers operating under limited Level 2 licenses, have upgraded to Level 3. The new license gives the companies the right to acquire and distribute optimized or customized OpenGL driver source code to their OEMs.

Intel will reveal the license as part of its Platforms for Visual Computing technology series which it will hold here today to highlight new PC and workstation technologies. And observers now expect Intel to roll both the SGI and Microsoft APIs into its Auburn 3-D accelerator architecture, which is under development, and to use OpenGL in its recently announced workstation unit (EN, March 17).

"Visual computing is the next step in the evolution of the Intel architecture platform," said Albert Yu, senior VP and GM of Intel's Microprocessor Products group. "OpenGL is an important 3-D graphics standard for visual computing, and it will greatly facilitate the flow of workstation graphics technologies to volume platforms."

The upshot of the license agreements, according to SGI and others, is that OpenGL and Direct3D will maintain a complementary, if somewhat uneasy, co-existence on the PC platform, with Microsoft providing mainstream gaming capability and SGI supporting CAD programs, cross-platform 3-D graphics over the World Wide Web and other high-level applications.

Just how this relationship will evolve remains to be seen, but if the two powerful APIs continue to reside in the same PC space, it could signal an end to some proprietary software interfaces, particularly those gaming APIs being promoted within the graphics industry.

"I believe they (OpenGL and Direct3D) will continue to co-exist," said Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst for Microprocessor Report. "There is a good reason to have two APIs, one of which is mathematically precise for CAD applications, and one which sacrifices a little bit of precision for better performance, and that's essentially what Direct3D is."

John Schimpf, SGI's OpenGL product manager, said the brute force of Microsoft's Direct3D marketing campaign, rather than any specific technological merits, has caused SGI to concede some of the gaming space, while still offering a workstation-class interface to enable high-end applications on mainstream PC systems.

"OpenGL complements Direct3D to an extent in that OpenGL does what Direct3D does and then some," said Mr. Schimpf. "I think what happened was there was a marketing push by Microsoft, and I think their marketing message was kind of masking the technology message.

Many Applications

"OpenGL brings a lot of applications to a lot of platforms, a class of applications classically available only on workstations. And if you enable the market, then there is more applications availability, and that's good. Quite frankly, that's what Direct3D promised, but I don't think it delivered the goods...The need for a games API is something of an artificial distinction."

Mark Kenworthy, group program manager for Microsoft's DirectX foundation, said Direct3D was, indeed, created specifically for interactive, multimedia applications, but, unlike OpenGL, works universally across the PC platform to alert the gaming application as to which graphics elements are hardware and which are software accelerated.

"Today, if you're trying to operate on a wide variety of architectures, that would be very difficult to do with OpenGL," said Mr. Kenworthy. "And if you're looking at what you'd need from OpenGL to satisfy your requirements for a real-time, interactive gaming environment, you'd find you'd have to make a number of changes to OpenGL. All of those are already in Direct3D."

SGI developed OpenGL several years ago in an era when content developers were more or less stuck with whichever proprietary API was written to their given platform. SGI hoped to establish an open standard by licensing OpenGL and established an architectural review board which included Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, among others.

SGI still administers the implementation of OpenGL, although Microsoft distributes the interface code and design kits to companies developing ICs on the PC platform. According to SGI, vendors which want to further propagate the source code to board or systems OEMs must get final approval from SGI.

Strict Mathematical Model

"OpenGL will continue to have a more strict mathematical model, and the architectural review board will continue to force people to implement OpenGL correctly," said Mr. Glaskowsky. "And Direct3D will not be able to get people to adhere to a strict mathematical model because there really isn't one there at all."