A few months back, Nvidia was happy to announce that they were the first video card vendor to get OpenGL support in their drivers, following a beta driver release that offered support on certain GeForce and Quadro boards. That driver package has since matured, and the company announced today that their drivers have moved out of beta and now offer full support for the OpenGL 3.0 spec.
For both Windows XP and Vista, Nvidia is making more OpenGL 3.0 extensions available. It isn't mentioned if their Linux drivers match the Windows drivers for OpenGL support as they have in the past, though their beta driver page says support is identical.
Nvidia may be the first to have a driver package that offers all OpenGL 3.0 extensions, but AMD isn't completely being left behind. Back in September, their update to the Catalyst driver package did include support for OpenGL 3.0, albeit with only a limited number of extensions. You can read more after the jump.
NVIDIA FIRST TO OFFER FULL SUPPORT FOR OPENGL 3.0
Drivers Provide Developers with Full Support for OpenGL 3.0 API and GLSL 1.30 Shading Languages
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2008 - Further demonstrating its leadership and commitment to OpenGL and the standardization process, NVIDIA® today released fully supported drivers for OpenGL® 3.0 for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux on its select GeForce® and Quadro® solutions. These drivers enable software developers to take full advantage of all OpenGL 3.0 capabilities, accelerating their delivery of cutting-edge media platforms and applications.
Building on four months of public beta testing, NVIDIA is now the first hardware developer to offer full support of the Khronos Group's new cross-platform 3D graphics standard. The new drivers implement the OpenGL 3.0 API and the GLSL 1.30 shading language to offer developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization and hardware acceleration functions. Developers can immediately begin using these drivers to build OpenGL 3.0 functionality into their software to give end-users new, superior graphics reproduction and visualization features.
"We are committed to providing users of our industry-leading graphics and visualization solutions with the most advanced functionality, best performance and widest compatibility possible," says Barthold Lichtenbelt, manager, OpenGL Software, NVIDIA and chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. "NVIDIA has supported the majority of OpenGL 3.0 capabilities since the Khronos Group publically announced the new standard and now gives developers complete support with the addition of preview contexts, one- and two-channel rendering and the ClearBuffer API."
For more information, or to download NVIDIA OpenGL 3.0 drivers, visit: https://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html.