Seeing NVIDIA, AMD and Intel agreeing on something is one of the most rare occurrences in PC gaming. They have, however, come to an agreement on OpenGL, an API developed by the Khronos Group.

The GDC this year has almost been focused on open platforms for all of PC gaming. The breaking away from huge corporations who will bottleneck systems, limit porting opportunities and keep games hostage to ensure exclusives seems to be over.

Valve announcing their Source2 enging will be fully utilising OpenGL, Crytek announcing their new Cryengine will support Linux and GOG and Valve pledging more support for Linux supported games, the future looks bright for PC gamers wishing to break free of the shackles of Microsoft dominated gaming.

The most exciting news of all of these, however, came today. Graham Sellers of AMD, Tim Foley of Intel and Cass Everitt and John McDonald of NVIDIA today announced that utilising OpenGL properly could increase performance over 7 to 15 times over competitors like DirectX.

With figures as high as this, the breaking away from Microsoft and corporation led programmes actually seems like a viable reality, instead of something only indie titles would pick up. The market is now very much open to AAA developers to start using this software and therefore make PC gaming a much more open platform.

You can find the presentation given at the GDC about OpenGL here, although full of jargon, it’s an interesting read.