Nvidia’s OGL driver is a driver. Mesa’s radv backend is a driver. Nouveau, the open source Nvidia meds backend is a driver. An opengl implementation does a driver make.
No, a driver is kernel code that interfaces with hardware; Mesa’s RADV implements Vulkan and RadeonSI implements OpenGL but both sit at the user level and get called by AMDGPU (the driver in the kernel). Above the kernel at user level is simply software…
Nouveau is a driver, yes… but it is in the kernel and calls into Mesa as well…
What GPU did Microsoft’s driver target? Or are you referring to a software implementation?
You seem to be confused that Microsoft needed to develop a GPU before implementing a version of their own OpenGL… this is flawed for a couple reasons that I’ve already outlined:
when OpenGL was designed, GPUs didn’t exist. Video cards existed, but a video card != GPU
OpenGLs original purpose was to be a 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) graphics API …
If you’ve ever used MS Windows before Windows 95 or even Windows 95 before Direct X was released, you’d know… MS shipped their own opengl32.dll with Windows
You literally said that Mantle was inspired by DX12, which is false. You can try to pivot to regurgitating more Mantle history, but I’m just saying…
AMD Mantle was inspired by Direct X 12… it was inspired by all of Direct X and the current next gen in development at the time which was Direct X 12.
take it from someone who literally wrote them for a living
For someone of your calibre, I’d expect a better understanding of what a driver is then. “above the metal” or more commonly “bare metal” should give that first clue. implementation of OpenGL a graphics library != driver…
I will refrain from posting any further… this is going no where…