Direct3D 10 design considerations

[Roderick Colenbrander]

The decision on what to do for a big part depends on what OpenGL 3.0 actually 
is. From carefully reading the latest OpenGL 3.0 announcements and their 
forums I come to the conclusion which I'll explain below.

There are basically two new OpenGL versions named respectively: Longs Peak,  
and Mt. Evans. Longs Peak is a cleaned up version of OpenGL 2.x and Mt. Evans 
would add DX10 features. For a long time everyone expected Mt. Evans to 
become OpenGL 3.0 and Longs Peak to be some OpenGL 2.x version.

Recently Longs Peak has been announced as OpenGL 3.0. Due to time constraints 
they weren't able to add all the features they wanted to Longs Peak, so they 
have added Longs Peak Reloaded (OpenGL 3.1?) which will arrive 2-3 months 
after 3.0. Further the 'DX10' version 'Mt. Evans' will arrive 3-5 months 
after 3.0.

So it appears like OpenGL 3.0 is going to be a port of OpenGL 2.0 to the new 
object framework. All the sources mention that all fixed function stuff that 
can be done using shaders has also been removed. Further according to posts 
in the OpenGL 3.0 topic at opengl.org some stuff has been kept using integers 
because of backwards compatibility.

What does this mean for Wine? Well it seems like OpenGL 2.1 hardware like the 
Geforce6/7 can perfectly work using OpenGL 3.0. For DX10 functionality you 
ofcourse need extensions. Further it might mean that none of the DX10 opengl 
functionality will be ported back to OpenGL 2.x. Nvidia has done it but I'm 
not sure if ATI and others will follow. I expect them to add those extensions 
only to their 3.0 drivers. (Remember that ATI is working on a new codebase 
for their OpenGL drivers. This might be the real reason ..)

Roderick