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New Catalyst has support for OpenGL 2.0

by: John -
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You don't hear much about OpenGL these days other than when iD brings out something new. ATI, though, hasn't forgotten about them and with new Catalyst 5.3 drivers bring support for OpenGL 2.0. Go get 'em while they're hot.
With the release of CATALYST 5.3 today, ATI is pleased to announce support
for Open GL 2.0. The addition of Open GL 2.0 provides a platform to
further leverage the power of our latest hardware to enhance the realism of
Open GL-based games and applications. Users have the ability to enjoy
increased visual realism in how scenes are rendered and in the use of
shadows - bringing a cinematic gaming experience that much closer.


This is a significant addition to CATALYST and further strengthens ATI's
position as providing the most stable, high performance driver in the
industry today.


The addition of Open GL 2.0 offers a number of key benefits for CATALYST
and ATI hardware, including:


1. Programmable shading - With this new release, both OpenGL Shading
Language and its APIs are now core features of OpenGL. New functionality
includes the ability to create shader and program objects; and the ability
to write vertex and fragment shaders in OpenGL Shading Language.


2. Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write
different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass.


3. Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting
rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption.


4. Two-sided stencil with the ability to define stencil functionality for
the front and back faces of primitives, improving performance of shadow
volume and constructive solid geometry rendering algorithms.


5. Point sprites which replace point texture coordinates with texture
coordinates interpolated across the point. This allows drawing points as
customized textures, useful for particle systems.