OpenGL

Professional graphics on the PC means OpenGL. OpenGL is everywhere: Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000 (in spite of what The Register says), Linux, BeOS, Sony Playstation II and the iMac. Within the year it'll probably turn up on the Palm Pilot!

So what plans does SGI have for bringing professional graphics to the PC? SGI's announcement that it's working with VA Linux and Nvidia (another way of writing it) is a big hint. I've seen some demos of what SGI is up to and it's definitely going to turn some heads. Also consider SGI's diminshed interest in Fahrenheit, Microsoft's long-promised scene graph. Could an open-source scene graph be in the works?

Then there are the strategic relationships that SGI has formed with Intel that extend into the Trillian project.

Isn't it interesting that recently, SGI hired GamePC co-founder Ken Nicholson. He's leading a team that's bringing high-performance OpenGL rendering to Linux. Soon Linux's graphics capabilities will rival or exceed those of Windows. What will this mean for professional graphics on Linux? What will this mean for Linux games?

What's David Petchey up to these days? He's working for former Microsoft game evangelist and Boot columnist Alex St. John at WildTangent. Web-based Java applets with high performance 3D that we have already covered at the time of the last Siggraph in August.

Steve Johnson? After launching the first Monster graphics card at Diamond, he took a job working on OpenGL at nVIDIA (ha, ha, there's that name again). Having fun playing Quake III on a GeForce card? Thank Steve and Michael Gold at Nvidia.

The people that brought about a revolution in graphics on Windows are not mucking about with Direct3D any more. They're working on Linux, Java and OpenGL. Maybe they got tired of Microsoft's limited ability to innovate. Maybe Direct3D was a disappointment. Maybe old technology just wasn't any fun anymore.

Or maybe after 10 years of Windows, they needed a three-day weekend.