I E-Mailed NVIDIA a couple of days ago regarding the Detonator 4 v20.80 drivers, and the reply was short and sweet.
Thank you for your email. The Detonator 4 drivers will be a number higher than 20.80 as we are also working on improving the Direct 3D performance as well. The release date of this week mentioned on a website was incorrect. These drivers will be released very soon although not this week. Please check back with us for more information.
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As you may have heard around, the new (and still not leaked or released!) Detonators 4 have OpenGL 1.3 support.
OpenGL is a high performance 2D/3D graphic API (advanced programming interface) that is the only Microsoft DirectX competitor.
OpenGL features an Open Source base that assures a cross platform portability and compatibility and a very good, stable and fast engine for 2D/3D graphics...
So, what's the point with the new OpenGL 1.3 and what does it offers?
The new core features enhances OpenGL in the following way:
Cube map texturing -- for higher quality environment mapping and lighting support
Multisampling -- for order-independent anti-aliased rendering of points, lines and polygons
New texture modes that provide more powerful ways of applying textures to rendered objects:
Texture Add Environment mode
Texture Combine Environment mode
Texture Dot3 Environment mode
Texture Border Filtering mode
Compressed texture framework -- to allow higher quality textures in less memory regardless of file format
As you may see from the above list the new OpenGL 1.3 will support a lot of the GeForce series hardware features that means developers may now add more and more stuff in their OpenGL games and apps. Just imagine for example a Quake3:Arena patch with cubic environment map texturing, or native support for multisampled anti-aliasing, etc.
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