Coming "soon" to an Iyonix near you

Hardware accelerated 3D graphics on RISC OS took a step closer to reality, thanks to Simon Wilson. Simon, who authored PCITV, claims to have ported Mesa 3.2, a 3D graphics library that sports an OpenGL software interface. More importantly, he says he has also ported an Nvidia graphics accelerator from BeOS to harness the GeForce2 video card in the Iyonix to plot graphics fast in hardware.

The software is, according to Simon, in a "pre-alpha" stage and will eventually release the software under the GPL. A previous port of Mesa performed its graphics operations in software and was ultimately, painfully slow. Graphics drawn by the dedicated Nvidia chipset are expected to be lighting fast in comparison.

He said: "The first image rendered was the classic OpenGL teapot. The driver is capable of double-buffering, texturing (including mip-mapping), lighting and shading, all in hardware. It also provides a number of 2D functions such as sprite cacheing and plotting, which may be provided as a library for 2D games."

Downloads and source code are said to appear on a website "soon". We also understand that the developer of Geminus is considering adding 2D hardware acceleration to his RISC OS 5 display driver.

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