Moshe Dunie, vice president of Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system division, was on hand at the Intel Visual Comuting event to provide the necessary backing from Redmond. Now a supporter of the OpenGL graphics library originally derived from its bitter enemy Silicon Graphics Inc, Microsoft says it is currently working with Intel to tuning OpenGL for MMX technology, and that its MCD mini-client driver model will simplify the task of writing OpenGL drivers for the AGP Accelerated Graphics Port. Microsoft itself plans to ship support for AGP in its Memphis product (the next release of Windows) and in Windows NT 5.0. Its DirectX 5.0 desktop graphics suite, due out in June, will also use AGP for processing off-screen surfaces and textures. Current versions of Microsoft’s Direct3D applications programming interfaces for the consumer market, which is a part of DirectX, already support MMX, and Microsoft anticipates that around 75 Direct3D games and educational titles will be shipping by the third quarter of the year. Beyond that, Microsoft has its Talisman software and hardware graphics technologies waiting in the wings (CI No 2,975).
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