It’s SIGGRAPH time, and this means all sorts of interesting announcements in the graphics world. One of these came today from AMD, who announced that they plan on shipping both EGL and OpenGL ES drivers on Windows for their recent GPUs.

One of the most challenging things in getting Firefox working with WebGL and hardware graphics acceleration has been dealing with platform-specific pieces to get access to OpenGL. In many cases similar functionality works differently (often in subtle ways), requiring both lots of testing and lots of very specific codepaths. EGL replaces all of these with a modern system designed with portability in mind. Until now, however, EGL has only been adopted in the mobile space. On the desktop, the older GLX, CGL, and WGL subsystems have held this role; in the case of GLX and WGL in particular, they bring along years of accumulated cruft.

Having a native EGL driver will allow us to ship one particular hardware acceleration provider that will work and be tested across various desktop and mobile platforms. Additionally, the same provider can connect to the ANGLE project, which implements EGL and OpenGL ES on top of Direct3D 9. Having OpenGL ES will allow us to test and develop truly identical code across desktop and mobile. As mobile graphics development has become important (not just to Mozilla, but in general!), having the same API implemented on the desktop will make it easier to catch problems and portability issues in an environment that’s much more conducive to development and debugging.

Native OpenGL ES on the desktop will also mean that we can tie our WebGL implementation directly to it, instead of going through the desktop OpenGL driver. Because WebGL follows the OpenGL ES specification, the native ES driver on the desktop will allow us to make a more efficient binding between WebGL and the underlying platform, potentially leading to higher performance.

As with any such change, it will be a while before we can depend on the presence of these APIs on the desktop. These first steps are important to making that change happen. I’m looking forward to seeing other vendors following AMD here, both on Windows and on other platforms.