NVIDIA IS FIRST TO SHIP OPENGL 3.0

Beta drivers for OpenGL 3.0 API and GLSL 1.30 shading language now available

SINGAPORE - August 18, 2008 - Last week, the Khronos Group announced the new OpenGL® 3.0 standard, NVIDIA Corporation today released beta drivers for the cross-platform, 3D graphics standard. The new drivers implement the OpenGL 3.0 API and the GLSL 1.30 shading language for both Windows XP and Windows Vista on selected GeForce® and Quadro® boards. With these drivers any developer can now explore the capabilities of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification. NVIDIA will be releasing production drivers for OpenGL 3.0 as a part of its regular driver development programme. More information and the drivers are available free of charge at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html.

The OpenGL specification provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualisation, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms. An open, vendor-neutral standard, OpenGL is the industry's most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

"OpenGL 3.0 is a significant advance for graphics standard and we're proud that NVIDIA has played a major role in developing it," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, Manager, Core OpenGL Software at NVIDIA and chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. "OpenGL 3.0 will be a first class API on both GeForce and Quadro boards. Shipping drivers two days after this new specification is released demonstrates our strong commitment to the OpenGL developer community and our partners who rely on the standard."

OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group and the new 3.0 version introduces dozens of new features to increase the functionality, flexibility, and performance of the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. The new functionality includes: vertex array objects, enhanced vertex buffer objects, 32-bit floating-point textures, render and depth buffers, new texture compression schemes, sRGB frame buffers, and an upgraded shading language. More information on the OpenGL 3.0 specification is at http://www.khronos.org/opengl/.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL and OpenGL ES. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a highperformance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce graphics products, the professional design and visualisation market with its Quadro® graphics products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and as offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. NVIDIA's inaugural NVISION 08 conference will be held August 25-27, 2008 in San Jose, California. For more information, visit http://www.nvidia.com and http://www.nvision2008.com.