SGA Gaming Night Archive

Well, I haven't worked much with OpenGL, to be hoenst most of my experience is using DirectX, or one of the platform-specific graphics APIs for the consoles. But the basic answer is that the shader system is something built in to the video cards, so any API can be created to take advantage of them.As you say, DirectX is updated about every other month, so it's able to keep up with (and help drive) the development of shaders, while OpenGL is updated much less frequently like once every couple of years. I believe the newest version of OpenGL can use shader model 2.0, but that's where they'll stay until the next version of GL comes out. And DX10 is only available for Vista at the moment, so Windows XP can't use shader model 4 (yet). There's no hardware reason for this; MS is just trying to drive sales of Vista through this limitation.