Now that the cat if officially out of the bag regarding the availability of GeForce2 hardware for Macs, would anyone from NVidia care to comment on when developers might be able to take advantage of GeForce-specific extensions (such as the register combiners, etc. etc.) under MacOS? Just curious because I know Apple has a very tough QA department, which has caused ATI’s feature set on MacOS to lag behind that of their PC counterparts in the past (sometimes by years). I have checked the Apple OpenGL site (still woefully out of date) and NVidia’s site but not much there beyond the press releases. At any rate, a big “WOOHOO” from one developer happy to see NVidia coming to the MacOS 
It’s true that Apple does have a very tight policy on extensions. Specifically, they tell us which extensions we are allowed to put in our extension string.
However, we have included a backdoor in the drivers. All the same features are there – after all, it’s basically the same driver and the same HW.
Now, I don’t know what our plans are in terms of documenting the backdoor. I hope we will be able to put a doc up on our developer site explaining how to access it, but if Apple tells us not to, I’m pretty sure we’ll obey.
Until I hear more, I’ll keep silent on the details of the mechanism.
- Matt
Matt,
That’s curiosity but, concerning this backdoor, would you have to remove it if Apple asks you not to make those extensions available publicly ?
I mean, if you leave the backdoor but do not tell how to use/access it, will you have problems ?
I ask this simply because if you leave this backdoor, someone will figure out how to use it… I am sure !
Regards.
Eric
P.S.: does anyone know why Apple would prevent its developer from accessing the latest 3D features ??? Is it because they want to keep some “standard” in their line ??
Apple knows about the backdoor. Apple is using the backdoor. The backdoor is already in the first-ship drivers. I doubt they will ask us to remove it, but there’s always the possibility.
You’d have to be a pretty smart PPC binary hacker to find it, I think. (I’d know how to find it, but I’d be cheating because I’d know where and how to look. )
I won’t go into Apple politics, i.e., your “why” question. I know the answer, but it would be inappropriate for me to talk about it.
- Matt