Posted on Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:00:00 CDT | by Luigi Lugmayr

NVIDIA Corporation released beta drivers for the new OpenGL 3.0 cross-platform, 3D graphics standard.
The new drivers implement the OpenGL 3.0 API and the GLSL 1.30 shading language for both Windows XP and Windows Vista on selected GeForce and Quadro boards.
With these drivers any developer can now explore the capabilities of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification.

The OpenGL specification provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms. An open, vendor-neutral standard, OpenGL is the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group and the new 3.0 version introduces dozens of new features to increase the functionality, flexibility, and performance of the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. The new functionality includes: vertex array objects, enhanced vertex buffer objects, 32-bit floating-point textures, render and depth buffers, new texture compression schemes, sRGB frame buffers, and an upgraded shading language.
NVIDIA will be releasing production drivers for OpenGL 3.0 as a part of its regular driver development program.
More information and the drivers are available free on the NVIDIA site.