What is the Sample Implementation good for?
The Sample Implementation is a reference implementation of the OpenGL, GLU, and GLX APIs, and also serves as the basis for almost all vendor-supported OpenGL hardware drivers in existence today. The internal structure of the SI is designed to hook out hardware acceleration at whatever level a graphics accelerator may be capable of, while gracefully falling back to software in other cases. Releasing the SI will also allow 3D hardware vendors to share common driver code and to maintain a single driver codebase for multiple OS platforms. The Sample Implementation does not include any hardware drivers at this time, so it will not immediately benefit most end users running applications using the OpenGL API . As with our 1999 GLX source code release, the SI is not an end in itself; it is part of the software infrastructure on which drivers are built. The release is targeted at the developer community.
