OpenGL 2.0 Drivers – or Not
January 21, 2009Edit: Don’t get your hopes up on this one. Earlier today ED posted that OpenGL 2.0 drivers were available. It is now thought this is not the case and it was a communication misunderstanding. When it is confirmed for sure I will update this post again.
Original post:
Wow, another blog post from EvilDragon:
There are some good news, indeed.
TI has released the 3D Drivers for the OMAP to the public – so expect some videos on the Pandora soon!But the best is: Those drivers are OpenGL 2.0 – NOT OpenGL ES! Yep, a fully working OpenGL 2.0! This will make porting a lot easier! Joy!
For anyone who is unsure about what this means, Chip elaborated a little here:
“Most (nearly all) open source 3D games use OpenGL as their 3D graphics API.
OpenGL ES is a reduced-functionality subset of OpenGL. In order to port a game that uses OpenGL to a system that uses OpenGL ES (what we all thought would have to happen for the Pandora), it requires quite a bit of work. Now many of these games (and applications and 3D engines) can be ported with much less effort, as the full OpenGL 2.0 library is supported.”
Or maybe not…
ED just posted this:
The link is here, but…https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/…3530/index.html
PLEASE NOTE!
There might’ve been a misunderstanding!
Craig did a quick post to me that TI published drivers and we got FULL OpenGL working!
It might’ve been that he wanted to tell me that we got the drivers fully working, not that it is in fact OpenGL 2.0 and NOT OpenGL 2.0 ES.We’ll update as soon as we know more! Sorry about that, I was really in a rush as I needed to go to work after posting the long long long post before… so I didn’t have much time to think about it more!
That’s what happens if you only sleep 3 hours and wake up with people demanding for news
mazza558
PlopperZ
TaG
gruso
Butterman
tovmas
The unofficial Pandora Blog 
For anyone who is unsure about what this means, Chip elaborated a little here:
“Most (nearly all) open source 3D games use OpenGL as their 3D graphics API.
OpenGL ES is a reduced-functionality subset of OpenGL. In order to port a game that uses OpenGL to a system that uses OpenGL ES (what we all thought would have to happen for the Pandora), it requires quite a bit of work. Now many of these games (and applications and 3D engines) can be ported with much less effort, as the full OpenGL 2.0 library is supported.”
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=46266
Thanks gruso – I’ll add that to the main post.
That is awesome news!
And again we have some other claim that looks wrong: there’s no OpenGL 2 in TI binary package.
Perhaps ED is talking about some other package.
As far as OpenGL 2 being a subset of OpenGL ES 2, that only means porting will be easier. But if the HW is really targetted at OpenGL ES 2, then in the end you might get *very* bad performance for OpenGL 2, because you will basically use software paths.
Craig has stated that there is no full OGL2.0 support.
I got my hopes up then…
And the “nice” thing is that references to ED’s claim have been removed from the forum.
Everyone has the right to do mistakes, ED apologized about his mistake, so all was well. So why remove the posts? I call that censorship, which I find quite disturbing when no insult or profanity was written.
Perhaps put a note about the update at the *TOP* of this blog post? In bold?
We’re not all checking the blog every five minutes. A lot of folk won’t read to the bottom, and even those that do there’s no need to get our hopes up.
@AndyL: I was talking about the forum, not this or other blog 😉
@AndyL I was going to wait until it had defininately been confirmed one way or the other. I’ll change it now though.
This project is getting more and more unprofessional. Its getting a bit too much now I think.
The team should just do updates if they are sure about something, and they should state facts.
@JayFoxRox: I partially agree, though you can’t blame people that are so passionate for doing mistakes… as long as they recognize them; ED does that…
TaG: thanks.