tkh’s blog

OpenGL on Windows Vista

Microsoft has planned to drop full OpenGL support *again* on Windows Vista with their compositing desktop engine like Quartz 3D in Mac OS X. When the desktop composition is enabled, OpenGL commands are translated to Direct X equivalent ones at run time, dropping OpenGL based applications performance to ~50%. If you disable the desktop composition, OpenGL applications run in full speed using the OpenGL ICD, but who wants to disable the desktop composition? This decision is so Microsoft, and it is the second time they do this kind of stuff. Obviously it led to the huge uproar in the OpenGL community.

Yesterday, I noticed the blog entry that OpenGL will be fully supported even with the desktop composition enabled. It seems that finally Microsoft listened to users, but we should be wary until they really release it and the performance is as good as Direct X.