OpenGL Now Natively Supported in Windows Vista

The reason why OpenGL was not ever officially supported by Microsoft was because of Direct3D. Direct3D is Microsoft's driver model whichis intended to make OpenGL unnecessary. However many games and applications use OpenGL even today. With Windows Vista, Microsoft made it clear that OpenGL support would only work as a layer sitting on top of Direct3D. There was going to be translation involved and thus, a performance hit.

This week the Khronos group, which is responsible for developing and maintaining OpenGL, has released a report indicating that OpenGL support will now be natively supported in Vista without layering over Direct3D. Using standard Windows installable client driver (ICD), OpenGL will be fully accelerated and be fully compatible with Windows Vista's Aeroglass UI. In fact, Khronos says that by the time Windows Vista ships, Aeroglass performance on OpenGL will be superior to that of Direct3D. According to Khronos and NVIDIA:

Hardware overlays are not supported
Hardware OpenGL overlays are an obsolete feature on Vista
ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/FBOs for same functionality

However, the OpenGL ICD drivers must still bedownloaded and will not ship on the Windows Vista installation disc. Khronos said that NVIDIA already has a beta 2 ICD OpenGL driver available and ATI will release its own soon. If no ICD is present, Windows Vista will rely on thelayered OpenGL mode by default and only offer basic functionality.

News source: DailyTech