Currently at version 4.1, OpenGL can handle a wide variety of tasks ranging from the drawing of simple line and polygons to rendering complex 3D environments that use modern concepts such as bump mapping and geometry shaders.
For native OpenGL applications such as Vega Prime and Lyra, an obvious question to ask is what version of the standard they support. While the question is short, the answer is a bit longer.
OpenGL is a standard that has a strong focus on backward compatibility. This means that the majority of code that is written against a specific version of the API will be able to be compiled and executed against a newer version of the standard. As such, making calls to functions that were defined in some of the earlier versions of the standard to render basic visual constructs is just as valid today as it was when they were first introduced.
In Vega Prime, this results in a mix of function calls from the first three major revisions of OpenGL, all working together to render the graphics that are seen during the execution of our rendering engine. To be more specific, here is a diagram that shows which APIs are used by some of the key Vega Prime modules.
Not only does this diagram give you a good idea of Vega Prime spans the many revisions of OpenGL, but it might also help you in specifying hardware for a given project since OpenGL 3.0 support is only available in graphics cards that support DirectX 10, another leading graphics library created by Microsoft. We can also see that we have not taken advantage of OpenGL 4.0 API calls so far, which leaves the door wide open to new capabilities in upcoming releases of our visualization products. Speaking of which, stay tuned to learn about new Vega Prime 5.0 features in the coming months. I will also follow up this article with a look at OpenGL support in our Embedded Graphics offerings in the near future.
