OIL & GAS

SANTA CLARA, CA—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, is pleased to announce that it has been elected by its peers in the technology industry as a permanent voting member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). Formed in 1992, the OpenGL® ARB is an independent consortium that governs the OpenGL specification. Composed of many of the industry's leading graphics vendors, the ARB defines conformance tests and approves new OpenGL features and extensions. The ARB has nine permanent voting members, including industry luminaries such as IBM, HP, Apple, and its founder, SGI. The ARB’s unanimous vote comes as a result of NVIDIA’s continuous dedication and commitment to the evolution of OpenGL. For many years, NVIDIA has been an active participant in the OpenGL ARB, and has contributed resources, technologies, and support to many working groups. “We are very proud to have been elected a permanent voting member of the OpenGL ARB,” said Kurt Akeley, co-inventor of OpenGL and a 3D graphics architect at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is committed to the OpenGL specification and we look forward to helping the ARB respond quickly and flexibly to evolutionary changes in computer graphics technology.” OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. OpenGL fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. “Promotion from auxiliary to permanent member status recognizes NVIDIA’s major contributions to OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 as well as its efforts at leading or participating in the development of many ARB-approved OpenGL extensions,” said Jon Leech, OpenGL ARB secretary at Silicon Graphics, Inc. “Silicon Graphics welcomes NVIDIA as a permanent member in the OpenGL Architectural Review Board.” OpenGL enables visual computing applications, from markets such as computer-aided design and digital content creation, to exploit modern graphics hardware. This capability allows developers catering to sectors including auto manufacturing, medical imaging, and film production to create compelling graphics. NVIDIA has been driving several of the key new features of the upcoming OpenGL® 1.5 release such as vertex buffer objects and occlusion queries. NVIDIA was also one of the primary contributors to the new OpenGL® Shading Language extension. In addition, NVIDIA contributed technology and expertise toward the development of multi-texturing, vertex and fragment programming, cube mapping, point sprites, and non-power-of-two textures to OpenGL.