IE11 To Support WebGL

mikejuk writes "The biggest problem with IE10 as far as modern web apps go is its lack of WebGL support. Now we have strong evidence that IE11 will support WebGL. A leaked build of Windows 'Blue,' aka Windows 8.1, also contained an early version of IE11. Web developer François Remy decided to see what it was hiding and found that there were WebGL APIs, but they were non-functional. Rafael Rivera, who writes the Within Windows blog, dug a little deeper and discovered the registry keys that have to be changed to enable WebGL support. Apparently the API works so well that you can take existing WebGL programs (with OpenGL shaders) and just run them. As the implementation also supports DirectX HLSL shaders, it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."

What a silly statement

[Sycraft-fu]

"it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."

No, more likely MS doesn't want to have to rely on vendors providing a working OpenGL driver, since that can be problematic (looking at you here ATi). If you have an accelerated Windows driver, a WDDM driver, it has DirectX support. That is how it works, just part of the spec. OpenGL, however, is an addon. Vendors can provide an OpenGL driver, or any other API they like, if they wish but it isn't an inherent part of the driver. They can choose not to provide them, or can provide broken ones.

So, would make sense for WebGl support to have something that does translation, so it works as long as you have a WDDM driver installed.