digiGO! — The Digital (R)Evolution™ — The Khronos Group Opening Up Windowing Systems

The Khronos Group, an industry consortium with more than 100 members working together to create open standards for authoring, accelerating, and accessing visual computing, have announced the release of the OpenWF™ 1.0 standard. OpenWF is an operating system-independent and hardware-neutral foundation for building windowing systems and providing display control functionality in accelerated mobile and embedded devices.

OpenWF enables a new degree of portability, acceleration and abstraction for windowing systems, while adding functionality and features through close integration with Khronos application APIs. OpenWF acts as the underlying route to the display for advanced graphics and multimedia content generated using APIs such as OpenGL® ES for fast and portable 3D graphics, OpenVG™ for vector graphics acceleration, and OpenMAX™ for multimedia. OpenWF provides two separate but complementary low-level APIs for composition of content and the configuration of display devices: OpenWF Composition and OpenWF Display. OpenWF Display enables portable access to display control hardware for manipulating screen attributes, while OpenWF Composition allows for layering and system-wide composition of application content. The two APIs can be used together or independently, depending on specific platform needs. OpenWF enables highly-optimized mechanisms to display application content in a windowing system. By eliminating redundant memory accesses, consumed memory bandwidth may be reduced by more than half, resulting in significant power savings.