Celestia Forums

So I came across this little freeware product:

Product Description:

OpenGL Extensions Viewer displays the vendor name, the version implemented, the renderer name and the extensions of the current OpenGL 3D accelerator.

If you have an Internet connection, you can retrieve from SGI the extension's specifications that explain the available extensions.

OpenGL Extension Viewer (GLView) has been suggested by OpenGL.org and nVidia for OpenGL developers. Available for English, French, Czech, Ukranian, Dutch, German, Japanese.

It tells which versions of OpenGL are implemented, which extensions are supported, etc. and even runs test. My guess is this would be pretty useful to the developers - expecially if we compile a database of various graphics card 's compliances. It comes up with a LOT of info so if someone more knowledgeable than I knows what is relevant, I'd be happy to post what my little Radeon 8500 is pumping out.

Here's the link: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/25549

I am sure you are aware that Celestia displays most of the required OpenGL info within the program itself, under Help->OpenGL Info. It looks e.g. like this for my (miserable) ATI 9200SE card in the office:



Bye Fridger

I am sure you are aware that Celestia displays most of the required OpenGL info within the program itself, under Help->OpenGL Info.

Well, yeah, I am aware that for some users the required OpenGL info is available in Celestia under Help->OpenGL... but for me (running the Mac OS X) version, the only thing under Help is "Celestia Help" and that merely gives an error when selected... unless I'm doing something wrong - which is ALWAYS a distinct possibility...

BlindedByTheLight wrote:

I am sure you are aware that Celestia displays most of the required OpenGL info within the program itself, under Help->OpenGL Info.

Well, yeah, I am aware that for some users the required OpenGL info is available in Celestia under Help->OpenGL... but for me (running the Mac OS X) version, the only thing under Help is "Celestia Help" and that merely gives an error when selected... unless I'm doing something wrong - which is ALWAYS a distinct possibility...

Let me perhaps "adjust" your wording a little

"some users" --> " all but OS X users"

The OpenGL info is available for Windows users (the vast majority) and all supported Linux varieties.

Bye Fridger

Ah... well, as I suspected. Good thing I'm used to being in the abandoned minority computer-wise... Of course, since that also includes abandoned by virus-writers, I won't complain too much.

I use the program you mention as well and it helped me find out yesterday - rather disappointedly - that Tiger still offers no complete support for Open GL 2.0

t00fri wrote:

BlindedByTheLight wrote:

I am sure you are aware that Celestia displays most of the required OpenGL info within the program itself, under Help->OpenGL Info.

Well, yeah, I am aware that for some users the required OpenGL info is available in Celestia under Help->OpenGL... but for me (running the Mac OS X) version, the only thing under Help is "Celestia Help" and that merely gives an error when selected... unless I'm doing something wrong - which is ALWAYS a distinct possibility...

Let me perhaps "adjust" your wording a little

"some users" --> " all but OS X users"

The OpenGL info is available for Windows users (the vast majority) and all supported Linux varieties.

Bye Fridger

Hello, Blinded

Well Fridger in reality want to say that us, poor osX users, don't have yet this feature implemented, but he hope that quickly this injustice will be repaired...

Supposedly - if the rumor sites can trusted 10.4.1 will bring 2.0 implementation... I guess we'll find out soon enough. The target release is mid-May to late May.

As far as I can recall, I started that rumor myself. :wink:

BlindedByTheLight wrote:Supposedly - if the rumor sites can trusted 10.4.1 will bring 2.0 implementation... I guess we'll find out soon enough. The target release is mid-May to late May.

Well there are many ways to implement 2.0. Right now Apple is saying, "it's too hard to implement hardware-accelerated GLSL so we're going to offer a software renderer for now. Besides, it works great!" Ok, so Tiger 10.4.0 runs GLSL fine, except the software renderer lacks many other GL features (extensions) that make it usable at all. It's only suitable as a demo now, and I'd be very surprised if a production-quality product was available in less than a month, for 10.4.1.

Anyway, the OpenGL info produced by Celestia (Windows + Linux) is really overkill for OS X, because unlike on Windows and Linux, OS X video drivers only get major updates very rarely. So once someone says "I have a eMac running 10.3.x...." or "I have an iMac 20" I bought yesterday running Tiger 10.4...." then it tells you what the GL version is, what the graphic card is, in short, just about everything needed for troubleshooting. However, it'd probably be useful in some cases for Celestia to print at least the max supported texture size (what Celestia should really do is report an error when it can't load a huge texture...).