id Software lead programmer John Carmack once again updated his .plan with a lengthy and technical discussion of graphics cards and related topics. Starting off with a follow-up to his earlier remarks on the Matrox Parhelia (story), John comments on a new 3Dlabs P10 card, using prototype OpenGL 2.0 extensions in a new DOOM III rendering back end for this card, future directions for GL2, and NVIDIA's Cg language. Here's an excerpt from the full .plan:

I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all the spec evolutions. If anything, I have been somewhat remiss in not pushing the issues as hard as I could with all the vendors. Now really is the critical time to start nailing things down, and the decisions may stay with us for ten years.

A GL2 driver won't give any theoretical advantage over the current back ends optimized for cards with 7+ texture capability, but future research work will almost certainly be moving away from the lower level coding practices, and if some new vendor pops up (say, Rendition back from the dead) with a next-gen card, I would strongly urge them to implement GL2 instead of proprietary extensions.

And on a somewhat related note, John Carmack also posted a /. comment titled "Realtime and offline rendering ARE converging" in this thread regarding the use of graphics cards for real-time rendering of animated movies, in place of render farms and specialist rendering software.