Conclusion

The issue of benchmarking is always a thorny one because customers often base their buying choices on benchmark scores. In the case of many professional users, choices are made at the enterprise level by people who are not going to move whole engineering teams to a new computing environment until drivers are stable, software applications are fully ported and hardware certifications are in place. One of the resources IT looks at to make their decisions are online benchmarks.

The forces behind OpenGL are worried that the perception that OpenGL isn’t fully supported in Windows Vista could cause customers to reconsider their applications based on OpenGL. An interesting side effect of all this is that tool vendors who have moved from OpenGL to Direct3D, the most influential one being Autodesk, are willing to let the misunderstanding continue figuring that if customers are reconsidering their CAD choices they might well take cast a kindly eye on Autodesk’s D3D-based products.

In the end, the transition will finally happen, the chasm will be crossed but there’s a great big village of engineers trying to make it go more smoothly than it has so far. Microsoft wants the transition to happen sooner rather than later. The OpenGL people hope nothing gets dropped in the chasm along the way. Even Apple is interested on the sidelines because wide support for OpenGL boosts the prestige of their operating system which takes advantage of OpenGL. The hardware vendors are working at full speed to improve their drivers. Computer OEMs and their CPU partners are more than ready for the boost to their sales that will come as companies ready to make the move to Vista refresh their hardware.

As a result there’s a weird sort of harmony out there as competitors pull together to get the story straight for consumers understandably bewildered by all the conflicting reports. Remember this because it’s temporary.