Pingback from  GPU Acceleration and 3D in Silverlight 3! - .NET & Funky Fresh

Pingback from  GPU Acceleration and 3D in Silverlight 3! | Silverlight Guide

I read this on ScottGu's blog yesterday, but as of yet I haven't seen any explanation of how they plan to enable hardware acceleration on non-Windows platforms. Is Silverlight going to work with OpenGL? Is there going to be some form of DirectX ported to OS X and lunix specifically for Silverlight to utilize? This is what interests me the most!

@Jordan - I'd be really, really surprised if they implemented DirectX on another OS. I strongly suspect it will use existing native apis.

RE: how they plan to enable hardware acceleration on non-Windows platforms Flash 10 lets you send commands to the GPU via their renderer and script engine. e.g. when I was programming on Windows NT, I could script the serial and parallel ports without actually having to use assembly language statements since the DriverX Toolkit (if I remember the name right) took my scripts and passed them down, in some form or the other, into their driver which ultimately executed the necessary assembly. The reason why I didn't want to use assembly language myself was because NT was a multi-user environment and thus "reserving ports" was important to avoid multi-user conflicts. Flash works the same way since Flash needs to rotate and process image bits so that's why they'll give you a hook to run GPU scripts since your GPU scripts need to cooperate with what Flash needs to do.

As far as I understand it, it will not actually be GPU support for 3D. It's going to be hardware support for overlays and some other stuff I think. The 3D features will actually only be the ability to transform objects making them appear as 3D. And basically it will be appearing like a square that has one edge shorter than the rest... Did that make sense? I hope so...