November 18th, 1999

[4:10 PM] Apple Opens OpenGL Performance To New Level
by Staff

Apple has released a new update to OpenGL. The new update includes increased performance, better support for AGP, new ATI drivers, and other enhancements. According to Apple:

OpenGL for Macintosh enables your computer to display three-dimensional graphics using applications designed to take advantage of OpenGL. OpenGL 1.1.2 includes the following changes:

  • Internal texture format hint is now supported
  • Better AGP texture management
  • Added support for Velocity Engine
  • Support for the EXT_texture_env_add extension

Lots of performance optimizations

This release also installs updated software for computers with the ATI RAGE 128 graphic accelerator card or on-board ATI RAGE graphic accelerator chip shipping in some Macintosh computers.

OS Required

  • Mac OS 8.1 or later

Software Required

  • QuickDraw 3D 1.6 (included with installation of OpenGL 1.1.2)

Hardware Required

  • A PowerPCTM based computer with a minimum of 32 megabytes of memory (RAM)

Installation Instructions

This software consists of a self-mounting Disk Copy compressed image (.smi) file. Download this software to your hard drive and then double-click it to use it.

You can find more information on the update, including download links, from Apple's web site. Mac OS 9 owners can use the Software Update control panel to automatically download it. [Note: Observers are reporting that some parts of the RoadRunner network are experiencing DNS problems that could prevent them from reaching Apple's web site. Patience, or a new provider, will see this solved.]

The Mac Observer Spin: This a much anticipated update to OpenGL. Hopefully it will fix some issues that have surrounded OpenGL and some recent game releases.

A Better Finder Info