OpenGL

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1992 and is widely used in CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, and flight simulation. It is also used in video games, where it competes with Direct3D on Microsoft Windows platforms (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D).

OpenGL is managed by a non-profit technology consortium, the Khronos Group.

For more information visit: www.opengl.org

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name DirectX was coined as shorthand term for all of these APIs (the X standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology.

The X initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite.
Direct3D (the 3D graphics API within DirectX) is widely used in the development of video games for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Xbox 360. Direct3D is also used by other software applications for visualization and graphics tasks such as CAD/CAM engineering. As Direct3D is the most widely publicized component of DirectX, it is common to see the names "DirectX" and "Direct3D" used interchangeably.

The DirectX software development kit (SDK) consists of runtime libraries in redistributable binary form, along with accompanying documentation and headers for use in coding. Originally, the runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. Windows 95 did not launch with DirectX, but DirectX was included with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2.

Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 both shipped with DirectX, as has every version of Windows released since. The SDK is available as a free download. While the runtimes are proprietary, closed-source software, source code is provided for most of the SDK samples.
Direct3D 9Ex, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 are only officially available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 because each of these new versions was built to depend upon the new Windows Display Driver Model that was introduced for Windows Vista. The new Vista/WDDM graphics architecture includes a new video memory manager that supports virtualizing graphics hardware to multiple applications and services such as the Desktop Window Manager.

For more information visit: http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/directx/

OpenSceneGraph

The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems. The OpenSceneGraph is now well established as the world leading scene graph technology, used widely in the vis-sim, space, scientific, oil-gas, games and virtual reality industries.

Some key features include:

• A feature-rich and widely adopted scene graph implementation
• Support for performance increasing features
• Support for OpenGL, from 1.1 through 2.0 including the latest extensions
• Tightly coupled support for OpenGL Shading Language, developed in conjunction with 3Dlabs
• Support for a wide range of 2D image and 3D database formats, with loaders available for formats such as OpenFlight, TerraPage, OBJ, 3DS, JPEG,PNG and GeoTIFF
• Particle effects
• Support for anti-aliased TrueType  text
• Seamless support for framebuffer objects, pbuffers and frame buffer render-to-texture effects
• Multi-threaded database paging support, which can be used in conjunction with all 3D database and image loaders
• Large scale, whole earth geospatial terrain paged database generation
• Introspection support for core libraries allowing external applications to query, get, set and operate on all classes in the scene graph, via a generic interface
• Multi-threaded and configurable support for multiple CPU/multiple GPU machines

For more information visit: http://www.openscenegraph.org

OpenInventor

OpenGL (OGL) is a low level library that takes lists of simple polygons and renders them as quickly as possible. To do something more practical like “draw a house”, the programmer must break down the object into a series of simple OGL instructions and send them into the engine for rendering. One problem is that OGL performance is highly sensitive to the way these instructions are sent into the system, requiring the user to know which instructions to send and in which order, and forcing them to carefully cull the data to avoid sending in objects that aren't even visible in the resulting image. For simple programs a tremendous amount of programming has to be done just to get started.

Open Inventor (OI) was written to address this issue, and provide a common base layer to start working with. Objects could be subclassed from a number of pre-rolled shapes like cubes and polygons, and then easily modified into new shapes. The “world” to be drawn was placed in a scene graph run by OI, with the system applying occlusion culling on objects in the graph automatically. OI also included a number of controller objects and systems for applying them to the scene, making common interaction tasks easier.

Finally, OI also supplied a common file format for storing “worlds”, and the code to automatically save or load a world from these files. Basic 3D applications could then be written in a few hundred lines under OI, by tying together portions of the toolkit with “glue” code.
On the downside OI tended to be slower than hand-written code, as 3D tasks are notoriously difficult to make perform well without shuffling the data in the scene graph by hand. Another practical problem was that OI could only be used with its own file format, forcing developers to write converters to and from the internal system.

For more information visit: http://www.vsg3d.com

Cuda

CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units or GPUs that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages. Programmers use 'C for CUDA' (C with NVIDIA extensions), compiled through a PathScale Open64 C compiler, to code algorithms for execution on the GPU. CUDA architecture supports a range of computational interfaces including OpenCL and DirectCompute.Third party wrappers are also available for Python, Fortran, Java and Matlab.

The latest drivers all contain the necessary CUDA components. CUDA works with all NVIDIA GPUs from the G8X series onwards, including GeForce, Quadro and the Tesla line. NVIDIA states that programs developed for the GeForce 8 series will also work without modification on all future Nvidia video cards, due to binary compatibility. CUDA gives developers access to the native instruction set and memory of the parallel computational elements in CUDA GPUs. Using CUDA, the latest NVIDIA GPUs effectively become open architectures like CPUs. Unlike CPUs however, GPUs have a parallel "many-core" architecture, each core capable of running thousands of threads simultaneously - if an application is suited to this kind of an architecture, the GPU can offer large performance benefits.

In the computer gaming industry, in addition to graphics rendering, graphics cards are used in game physics calculations (physical effects like debris, smoke, fire, fluids); examples include PhysX and Bullet. CUDA has also been used to accelerate non-graphical applications in computational biology, cryptography and other fields by an order of magnitude or more.

CUDA provides both a low level API and a higher level API. The initial CUDA SDK was made public on 15 February 2007, for Microsoft Windows and Linux. Mac OS X support was later added in version 2.0, which supersedes the beta released February 14, 2008.

For more information visit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html

OpenSG

OpenSG is a scene graph system to create realtime graphics programs, e.g. for virtual reality applications. It is developed following Open Source principles, LGPL licensed, and can be used freely. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X and is based on OpenGL.

Its main features are advanced multithreading and clustering support (with sort-first and sort-last rendering, amongst other techniques), although it is perfectly usable in a single-threaded single-system application as well.

It was started, just like many other systems, at the end of the scenegraph extinction in 1999 when Microsoft and SGI's Fahrenheit graphics API project died. Given that there was no other scene graph system on the market nor on the horizon with the features the authors wanted, they decided to start their own.

OpenSG should not be confused with OpenSceneGraph which is entirely different scene graph API, somewhat similar to OpenGL Performer. Development on both started about the same time, and both chose similar names.

For more information visit: http://www.opensg.org