What is it?

Revised drop-in implementation of SWT's GLCanvas.

What does it get me?

Support for:

• creating OpenGL 3.0 and 3.2 core/compatibility contexts (including debug/forward compatible)
• OpenGL ES contexts
• no error contexts
• floating-point and sRGB pixel formats
• multisampled framebuffers (also with different number of color samples - Nvidia only)
• v-sync/swap control
• context flush control
• robust buffer access (with application/share-group isolation)
• sync'ing buffer swaps over multiple windows and cards - Nvidia only
• delay before swap - Nvidia only

Why does it exist?

The above features have been lacking for some years in the SWT-provided GLCanvas implementation. The purpose of the new implementation on top of LWJGL 3 is to have full support for those features in an OpenGL SWT application.

How to use it?

In your existing SWT application just replace all imports of org.eclipse.swt.opengl.* with org.lwjgl.opengl.swt.*. The new implementation is a drop-in replacement, which means that your current SWT code should work like before. To use the new features you can use the new fields in the GLData class, such as using real multisampled framebuffers or creating a OpenGL 3.2 core context.

If your current OpenGL SWT setup looks like this:

Display display = new Display();
Shell shell = new Shell(display);
shell.setLayout(new FillLayout());
GLData data = new GLData();
GLCanvas canvas = new GLCanvas(shell, 0, data);

then adding multisampling and using a OpenGL 3.2 core context is as easy as doing:

Display display = new Display();
Shell shell = new Shell(display);
shell.setLayout(new FillLayout());
GLData data = new GLData();
data.profile = GLData.Profile.CORE;
data.majorVersion = 3;
data.minorVersion = 2;
data.samples = 4; // 4x multisampling
data.swapInterval = 1; // for enabling v-sync (swapbuffers sync'ed to monitor refresh)
GLCanvas canvas = new GLCanvas(shell, 0, data);

Vulkan support

Much like with the GLCanvas/GLData for OpenGL there is now also first exprimental Win32 support for Vulkan:

Display display = new Display();
Shell shell = new Shell(display);
shell.setLayout(new FillLayout());
VKData data = new VKData();
data.instance = instance; // <- the VkInstance created outside via LWJGL 3
VKCanvas canvas = new VKCanvas(shell, 0, data);
long surface = canvas.surface;

What is planned for the future?

Support for:

• Vulkan
• associating rendering contexts with specific GPUs on Nvidia and AMD
• pbuffers (there are interesting extensions that are only supported for pbuffers, such as EXT_packed_float and NV_video_output)