Of GPUs and APIs…
And leave us nought but grief and pain… isn’t thankfully something Linux users have to experience these days!
W e’re lucky to live in a time when the Linux Kernel gets, on the whole, first-class hardware support, but it hasn’t always been this way. This is especially so when it came to 3D graphics support – or frankly graphic support of any kind. After Jonni’s in-depth look into the Kernel’s graphics stack and how you can tinker with it, we thought it would be useful to outline how graphics hardware has evolved alongside all those mentioned APIs – and their growing feature sets – used to access all the fancy hardware features.
As you’ve already read, OpenGL sprang out of Silicon Graphics’ proprietary IRIS GL, developed over the 1980s for its own hardware and eventually running on flavours of Unix. This gave OpenGL rich hardware rendering alongside processor-based software rendering options.