Multi-Threaded OpenGL?

Tuncer Denis of InsideMacGames.com has an interesting post on his blog speculating that Apple is readying an update to OpenGL that will bring up to a reportedly 2x performance boost.

One person told me they saw a very popular MMORPG DOUBLE in frame rates in one particular scene because of multi-threaded OpenGL. We’re talking from 60 frames to 130 frames just in that one scene alone.

Tuncer goes on to mention that multi-threaded OpenGL will only be available on the new Mac Pro but may yet make it into Tiger 10.4.8. But, he then contradicts himself and says it may wait for Leopard.

Ah, the way of rumors.

I’m a bit puzzled as to what multi-threaded OpenGL means. Does this mean that it is now thread-safe? I thought it already was. Or does this mean it “automagically” takes advantage of additional cores and processors behind the scenes with no additional programmer work?

Either way, it will be interesting to see what kind of performance gains we will see.


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One response to “Multi-Threaded OpenGL?”

  1. […] Yesterday, I mentioned the possibility of a multithreaded version of OpenGL coming to Mac OS X. […]