Autodesk technician explains why OpenGL will not be in Inventor

Despondent that your subscription is not going to offer you useful options that make sense? This one might throw you into an even deeper funk. Don’t handle sharp objects, firearms or walk over bridges after reading this.

SolidWorks is very heavily invested in OpenGL graphics. OpenGL means that you have to pay a lot more for a graphics card to run SolidWorks, and makes SolidWorks more prone to graphics crashes, but it is an “open source” graphics language. Direct3D (a subset of DirectX) is a Microsoft graphics standard. Since when did SolidWorks start supporting open source over their buddy MS? Well, who knows about that. OpenGL was the only game in town for a long time for advanced graphics.

A reader pointed me to this article on the MCAD forums where an Autodesk tech explains some of the details of DirectX/Direct3D and OpenGL. CAD trends are leading away from OpenGL, as I pointed out in a previous post. Is all of this investment in RealView going to transfer to Direct3D, or is SolidWorks going to continue to require spiralling hardware requirements to keep the software from running slow and crashing? Is the investment in all of the OpenGL RealView eye candy preventing SolidWorks from allowing users to be more productive for less money? Inventor users have this benefit now.

Read this article. It is long, but contains information that is relevant to all MCAD users.

http://www.mcadforums.com/forums/files/autodesk_inventor_opengl_to_directx_evolution.pdf

The article doesn’t mention HOOPS, which is a kind of go-between between your CAD program and OpenGL or DirectX. HOOPS is used so that CAD programmers don’t have to worry about understanding OpenGL or DirectX calls, they just implement the HOOPS calls, or at least that is my understanding of it. SW does license some HOOPS technology, but I have no idea to what extent it is implemented.