Does anyone happen to still remember the controversy over the rumors that Microsoft was going to deprecate OpenGL once and for all in the new WDDM driver model announced for Vista? Well, almost 20 years later, here comes the final counterargument, lol.
The really amusing part for me here is that for some reason this fact is not widely known. Even the Khronos Wiki itself has some outright false information.
Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is deprecated on Windows; Microsoft hasn't developed it for quite some time. It offers no hardware acceleration, either.
Deprecated doesn't mean removed. Many Windows features stick around for 10+ years before they're yanked.
> Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is deprecated on Windows; Microsoft hasn't developed it for quite some time. It offers no hardware acceleration, either.
One must choose words carefully here. While the default "GDI Generic" renderer is indeed contained in opengl32.dll, this same library is also responsible for forwarding OpenGL API calls to the appropriate driver. Which is why available acceleration applies transparently, if application doesn't request software processing explicitly.
It's also interesting that NVIDIA monkeypatches something in the instance of this DLL at the process-level if you run it with "High-performance NVIDIA processor".
I remember. It became a non-issue when Nvidia and ATI said their drivers overrode all Microsoft's Opengl implementations, and beta testing showed that was the case.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79399744/what-is-display...