ATI OpenGL® driver is a software interface between graphics card hardware and the OpenGL® API. It includes custom extensions for special features and optimizes graphical procedures via hardware. Compatibility issues may arise due to shared drivers and non-standard programming steps.
An ATI Open Graphics Library® (OpenGL®) driver is a software interface developed by ATI Technologies to be the bridge between the graphics card hardware and the abstract programming interface (API) for the OpenGL® library. There are different drivers for each operating system and different drivers for the various graphics card architectures sold. The ATI OpenGL® driver is specifically designed to take full advantage of your graphics hardware while maintaining an interface compatible with the OpenGL® API. The driver includes custom OpenGL® extensions that can be used to access special features or accelerated functions of the graphics card consistently within the OpenGL® framework. Not all ATI graphics cards have their own custom ATI OpenGL® driver, which means that some share a common driver, which can cause problems when certain features are required that the hardware does not support.
One of the most important jobs that the ATI OpenGL® driver performs is to access the graphics card hardware directly through whatever hardware interface it uses to communicate with the main computer system. This benefits programmers, because the manufacturer produces drivers within strict specifications for best performance. Additionally, ATI works with the Architecture Review Board (ARB) which maintains the OpenGL® specification so that as new hardware develops, OpenGL® can evolve simultaneously and support can be implemented from both sides.
Operations using floating point numbers, for example, are routed through the ATI OpenGL® drivers and then handled by the graphics processing unit (GPU) on the graphics card, which has special registers to make operations as fast as possible without using any of the processing power of major computers. Many low-level operations dealing with fragments, vertices, and arrays are passed directly to the GPU, in most cases, through the driver. This kind of functionality would be impossible or very unreliable if the driver weren’t present.
Entire graphical procedures can be optimized via hardware. For example, the ATI OpenGL® driver can pass information to the GPU so that anti-aliasing, blending and multisampling can be done directly in the hardware. The driver also provides access to temporary memory within the card so that texture images or vertex arrays can be stored and used completely within the graphics hardware.
There are some complications when using an ATI OpenGL® driver. There are so many ATI graphics card hardware models that some drivers are shared and can cause compatibility issues with certain function calls. There are also some non-standard, non-OpenGL® programming steps that may need to be performed in order for the ATI card to perform its own optimizations. Creating a program optimized for an ATI graphics card could also mean creating a program that is not compatible with another brand of card.
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