Microsoft and SGI Team Up to Deliver OpenGL on Windows

Microsoft and Silicon Graphics have announced that they will deliver a toolkit for developing OpenGL drivers for the entire family of Windows platforms, including the currently available Windows NT 4 and Windows 95, as well as the upcoming Windows 98 and Windows NT 5. To this end, a new 3D Graphics Device Driver Kit (or DDK) will be released sometime in the spring of 1998. The kit will be based on Silicon Graphics' brand of OpenGL and will enable OEMs to support OpenGL in their hardware. For the game community, this means that high-quality Windows-based OpenGL drivers for their favorite 3D accelerator will be available in the not-so-distant future.

Previously, despite increasingly loud demands from software and hardware developers, Microsoft had resisted pressure to support OpenGL in Windows. The company had argued that its own proprietary API, Direct3D, was better for consumer applications and thus made OpenGL superfluous, and that it didn't possess the resources or business interest necessary to simultaneously support two APIs with such similar functionality.

Apparently, that all changed with the involvement of Silicon Graphics, a key developer of OpenGL applications. Today both companies expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of bringing the API to Windows, although Microsoft spokesman Kevin Dallas indicated that from Microsoft's perspective at least, Direct3D is still the premier API for consumer-oriented graphics applications.

Tell that to John Carmack, one of Open GL's greatest proponents and developer of the premier Open GL consumer application, Quake. "Microsoft's endorsement of hardware accelerated OpenGL across both of their desktop operating systems has given us exactly what we want - the API of our choice on the distribution platforms of our choice."