Pragmatic description

This library is meant to provide an implementation of the ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program OpenGL extensions. Modern 3D hardware such as ATI's Radeon or NVIDIA's GeForce series have programmable geometric pipelines (executing 'vertex programs') and rasterizers (executing 'fragment programs').

Vendors have progressively contributed proprietary OpenGL extensions to let the user provide its own vertex and fragment programs. The OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) has recently set a standard language interface :

• the ARB_vertex_program, part of the OpenGL 1.4 specification (July 24, 2002)
• the ARB_fragment_program, published on September 18, 2002

This library implements the frontend (the extensions API and a parser), and tries to provide backends based on existing (and available) proprietary extensions.

Technical description

This library is meant to provide an implementation of the ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program OpenGL extensions. It is composed of :

• A frontend which provides the regular API to the user, automatically extending <GL/glext.h> if such interfaces are not available.
• A lexer and parser for both vertex and fragment programming languages
• Switchable backends. For both vertex and fragment program extensions :
  • arbprogram will check if the extension is already supported, and let the developer use it transparently if this is true
  • otherwise arbprogram will search for proprietary extensions and try to emulate the ARB program extensions.

Status

• EXT_vertex_shader (ATI) [not implemented yet]
• NV_vertex_program (NVIDIA) [not implemented yet]

• ATI_fragment_shader (ATI) [not implemented yet]

Usage and license

To use this library, simply link your program with it. This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL, see the COPYING file for the whole story.

The ARB does not guarantee that the OpenGL specifications and its extensions are free of patents. Therefore, this program may infringe software patents through the OpenGL specifications. For more information, please refer to the reference documentation.

See http://opengl.org/developers/documentation/specs.html.

ATI and Radeon are trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc.
NVIDIA and GeForce are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and/or other countries
OpenGL is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Last update : Oct 9 2002 Contact : zerodeux