ANGLE or Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, is an Open Source Project to make it possible to run WebGL, a driverless API to DirectX 9. The project is still-developing cross-platform Web standard for accessing low-level 3D graphics hardware based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that can be implemented directly in a browser without a plugin.

WebGL is implemented in many browsers but has direct dependency on OpenGL drivers on each Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. On the other hand, the competing graphics API is Microsoft’s Direct3D, which is part of the company’s DirectX graphics technologies. Microsoft’s DirectX technologies have increasingly become dominant in PC gaming and have almost ruled out OpenGL on windows.

The challenge with WebGL is that many Windows machines  can’t (Mac, Linux can) render WebGL content because the OpenGL drivers aren’t installed, even though the computer has powerful graphics hardware (GPU to be precise).

ANGLE will allow Windows users to overcome this problem and run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system. Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices as per Google.

“ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop”

Access ANGLE on Google Code

We write Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter@taranfx or subscribe below:

According to AppleInsider, this update deals with some of the common instability issues with core applications and components like  AppKit, CoreMedia, Desktop Services, FileSync, Fonts, HIToolbox, iCal, Mail, MobileMe, and QuickTime Player X, and more

Snow Leopard had been singificant update, under the hood. But some have claimed Snow Leopard to be apple’s Vista. Evidently, nearly 60 crash-happy bugs have been fixed  across more than 90 components with this update. The top ones being : Fix for printing issues with iCal, Mail and PhotoBooth, AppKit, the Dock, iCal, Mail, Photo Booth, Rosetta, Spotlight, Screen Sharing, and Software Updater. Apart from bugs, it includes new compatibility updates like native support for the Apple’s Multitouch Magic Mouse.

Update: Apparently 10.6.3 will also feature support for OpenGL 3.0. While it is not fully implemented in the current build, we are hopeful that the latest version of the OpenGL standard will be integrated, which is a cross-platform rendering API, primarily directed at 3D graphics tasks such as gaming, CAD and visual effects. The current developer build includes 22 OpenGL 3.0 extensions, as well as some for the 3.1 and 3.2 specifications.

The Patch update has moved into testing in December, and since then quality has been on the continuous improvement. That update was in beta for just over a month, we can see it going public very soon.

Subscribe to us via @taranfx and we will let you know as soon as it becomes public and detailed Fixes/features. The current build is 665.7MB in size.

Mozilla’s WebGL project gives web developers a way to connect the HTML 5 Canvas tool, which can be used to display complex graphics in the browser without plug-ins like Flash, to the OS’s native, hardware accelerated graphics engine, OpenGL.

OpenGL is an OS-native graphics engine that’s most often associated with video games, but is also often used in data visualizations and virtual reality apps. These days, It’s the backbone for Rich graphics in the OS UI. The trend started with Apple adopting it in one of the earlier Macs, followed by Windows Vista and Windows 7.

OpenGL, as the name says in Open standard so is Apple’s OpenCL. Following the Trend, Mozilla is also trying to turn WebGL into an open standard for browsers. There’s already a WebKit version of WebGL in development, though so far the sole users of the webkit, Google Chrome & Safari don’t have added WebGL support.

Even the new WebGL support in the Firefox nightly builds is very much in the alpha testing stage. In other words, don’t look for your favorite online games to rush to adopt WebGL tomorrow.

However, as developers start to experiment with the new tools we’ll likely get a sneak peek at how HTML 5 can push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web for 3-D animations interfaces without using Flash, Silverlight or any other plug-ins.

If you’d like to experiment with WebGL with a trunk nightly build, all you have to do is change a preference: load about:config, search for “webgl“, and double-click “webgl.enabled_for_all_sites” to change the value from false to true.  You’ll currently have the most luck on MacOS X machines or Windows machines with up-to-date OpenGL drivers.

So far Mozilla doesn’t have any working demos or examples of what you can do with WebGL, but developer Vladimir Vukićević, who has been working on the project, and has come up with an example from the Game Spore.

Featured at the Mozilla Hacks website, it shows how WebGL can be used to display a COLLADA model. Specifically, it uses a critter exported from the popular video game Spore. The demo displays the 3D model in a Canvas element and allows the user to rotate by clicking and dragging. A quick glance at the page source code provides some insight into how WebGL works. In the sporeview.js file, Canvas event listeners detect when the user clicks and moves the mouse so that the model can be rotate as the user drags. The Spore model, which is in the XML-based COLLADA format, is loaded with an XMLHttpRequest in the SporeFile.js script. The OpenGL shader language is used inside of HTML script tags that are referenced by ID in the JavaScript code. It’s fascinating to see how the underlying concepts of OpenGL programming have been adapted for the Web.

(Mac OS X users shouldn’t need to bother with software rendering, since Apple already provides a high quality OpenGL implementation, and Linux users should be ok as long as they have recent OpenGL drivers installed.)

Apple is Ready to bet on the work they have done with GPUs in and they claim they were the first one to have this insight in Desktop and Mobile Computing.

Apple’s support for OpenGL and new implementation of OpenCL  in GPGPU computing is going to change the industry trends.  The intent is to  weaken Microsoft’s proprietary drive to make DirectX/D3D the primary API supported by GPU hardware developers such as AMD/ATI and NVIDIA and rather encourage a more Open approach, OpenCL.

Is this the Secret of Success of Apple MAC OS X and shiny gadgets like iPhone ?

Image Credit:Tweaktown

Background

Apple didn’t woke-up to GPU power yesterday. They had long lived up to the dream of offloading CPU and use GPU for complexer graphics floating point calculations, there by increasing overall performance keeping the optimal use of hardware.

OpenCL, initially developed by Apple, is analogous to the open industry standards OpenGL and OpenAL, for 3D graphics and computer audio, respectively. OpenCL extends the power of the GPU beyond graphics (GPGPU). OpenCL is, now,managed by the non-profit consortium.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors. OpenCL includes a language (based on C99) for writing kernels (functions that execute on OpenCL devices), plus APIs that are used to define and then control the platforms. OpenCL provides parallel computing using task-based and data-based parallelism.

Apple’s GPU support in Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard extends support for modern hardware with OpenCL, which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard.

The move toward greater utilization of available GPU resources, along with Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch architecture helps making it easy and transparent for developers to deliver. The effort doesn’t end here. It enables Apple to innovate in future hardware, investing in new acceleration chips of its own design and harnessing more power by including support for more of the existing GPU resources from vendors like Nvidia, ATI (AMD).

Talking about  OpenGL on other platforms, from the Wii to the PlayStation 3, it’s harnessed to extremes. Apple’s own  iPhone/iPod touch in mobile device computing, is no less than as compared to gaming consoles.

The story no longer holds good future for Microsoft’s established Business of “killing open GPU standards” and substituting them with Windows-only alternatives, will eventually evade.

Apple’s  approach to GPU

Apple realised the power of GPU way back in 1999 but applied it in proprietary Mac OS X’s Quartz Graphics hardware.

On the contrary, Microsoft didn’t get its own product with advanced, modern graphics compositing to market until Vista in 2007. And then failed to actually sell it to it’s users. On an average, approximately 20% of people migrated to Vista from XP. (not including forced new Vista PCs).

This power of GPU was not just realized for MAC. Apple extended the concept to iPhone. The iPhone uses an embedded “System on a Chip” which includes an ARM core along with with high performance, dedicated Graphics cores that Apple has fully exploited to defer interface-related processing to hardware, much like a video game system that we see in Windows world.

Currently, no one in the industry has taken full advantage of GPU on mobile devices. That’s why no one else has been able to match iPhone’s graphics, yet.

Windows was stuck in the old CPU driven architecture while MAC OS moved large parts of the code behind UI and rendering to those high power GPUs initially developed for gaming. It took 5 years or so from the mighty Microsoft to hammer its OS to adapt to this new computing paradigm and release Vista, and a better implementation in Windows 7, around more than a decade after Apple did.

“And exactly the same happened in mobile devices. Apple’s competitors were developing OS architectures initially built for menu driven UI’s in the times when CPU was the main processing unit. Effective use of the GPU will play an increasingly large role as devices get more mobile and as users’ expectations increase. Apple is ahead of the game both in conventional PCs and in mobile devices, with rivals such as Microsoft and Nokia just recently discovering the importance of focusing on the GPU to deliver the power needed to provide a rich, animated user interface.”

“What Apple needed to do was to downscale its OSX a bit and partner with Imagination Technologies to develop a powerful mobile optimized graphics core. Suddenly they could run an UI that required several multiples of processing power the traditional mobile computing platforms were able to deliver. But since iPhone used GPU to crunch the heavy parts of UI code Apple could do it. The rest is history.”

“There is a long list of other things Apple did right and assets they had, but without a great ‘inertia’ in mobile operating systems and this shift in mobile computing platforms they would have not been able to shake the market so greatly.”

By sharing technology between its iPhone and Mac platforms, Apple is building upon its lead in fully exploiting the latent power available in the GPU. That’s the exact reason why Snow Leopard is faster than previous generations OS. Snow Leopard specifically delivers a richer, subtly more animated user interface right out of the box and provides powerful toolkits to allow third party developers to wring the most performance from the hardware available, without overloading CPU much.

Sources: AppleInsider, Apple, TomsHardware

CPU has gone multicore, still we need GPU powered applications for all types of complex graphics.

May it be Windows Aero interface or Your photo/video editing/re-sampling application, it now needs and is able to Utilize your GPU (provided you have supported one).

Accelerated Graphics, totally absent from Web world, are now opening up for direct GPU access offloading CPU further. A new venture that includes  Mozilla, Google, and Opera Software — along with graphics processor leaders AMD (ATI) and Nvidia, announced this morning their intention to produce a royalty-free mechanism for producing hardware-assisted 3D graphics using JavaScript-enabled Web pages, for initial distribution during the first half of next year.

The Internet Graphics are planned to be based on OpenGL ES. The new Web-OpenGL or WebGL language could potentially open up the field of Web applications to classes of software traditionally reserved for local, on-system installation, including computer-aided design and engineering, rich visualization, and of course, gaming. While the <CANVAS> element in HTML 5 is already supports 3D geometry, what WebGL would enable is the ability for JavaScript developers to utilize the GPU to produce fast, fluid, rendered scenes, effectively extending the already proven OpenGL ES system used by Sony’s PlayStation 3, to the realm of Web apps.

WebGL is intended on Hardware accelerated complex 2D, 3D Rendering of pixels, which is much faster as compared to Software rendering.

It’s evident that the WebGL would be integrated into browsers, not attached as add-ons. In many senses, WebGL already is integrated, through browsers such as the latest Firefox 3.5 that already support HTML 5. What work remains includes the production of a final, formal specification for WebGL.

Motivating the new WebGL standard, Mozilla standards evangelist said,

“The Web has already seen the wide proliferation of compelling 2D graphical applications, and we think 3D is the next step for Firefox. We look forward to a new class of 3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas, and for creative synergy between OpenGL developers and Web developers.”

At this time, there is no good code to demonstrate power of WebGL.

One of them appeared in December 2005 project SourceForge site, in a file named sample.html. And it’s not that impressive: a live rendering of three sides of a randomly rotating cube. The source code for this little project, shown here, reveals that familiar OpenGL functions that define viewports, object identities, and that scale and rotate an object within a viewport, show up quite clearly as JavaScript functions.

For more than 3 years, the rotating cube corner has pretty much been the Benchmark / “test pattern” for WebGL. But today’s endorsement by the Khronos Group, responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, could catapult this project from virtual stagnation into overdrive.