Switch To OpenGL
As OpenGL gained traction on Windows (often credited to id Software, who championed the API over D3D), hardware developers were increasingly designing future hardware against the future feature set planned for Microsoft’s D3D. Through its extension mechanism OpenGL was able to track these changes relatively easily, while RAVE’s feature set remained relatively fixed.
At the Macworld Expo in January 1999, Apple announced that neither QuickDraw 3D nor RAVE would be included in Mac OS X. The company laid off the development staff in June 1999, replacing the in-house technology with OpenGL after buying a Mac implementation and key staff from Conix.
Today there remains no standard high-level API for 3D graphics. Several attempts have been made, including OpenGL++ and the SGI/Microsoft Fahrenheit graphics API, but none of these have made it to production.
After Apple withdrew support for QD3D, an open source implementation of the QD3D API was developed externally. Known as Quesa, this implementation combines QD3D’s higher level concepts with an OpenGL renderer. As well as cross-platform hardware acceleration, this library also allows the use of the QD3D API on platforms never supported by Apple (such as Linux).
Read more about this topic: QuickDraw 3D
Famous quotes containing the word switch:
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)