Mark J. Kilgard is a graphics software engineer working at

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. Prior to joining Nvidia, Mark Kilgard worked at

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

and

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

. While at Silicon Graphics, he authored the

OpenGL Utility Toolkit The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard ...

, better known as GLUT, to make it easy to write OpenGL-based 3D examples and demos. The primary reason for this was the lack of a windowing and input

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

with OpenGL using GLX. Mark Kilgard wrote and released many OpenGL technical sample programs during the pushback against Microsoft's competitive FUD against the API, and his GLUT toolkit (ported to Windows by

Nate Robins Nate or NATE may refer to: People and fictional characters *Nate (given name) *A nickname for Nathanael *A nickname for Nathaniel Organizations *National Association for the Teaching of English, the UK subject teacher association for all aspects ...

) allowed these examples to run cross platform on Windows PC systems as well as SGI workstations. At Nvidia, Mark Kilgard has helped design important parts of 3D graphics APIs. He has written key whitepapers, including " Cg in Two Pages". He is the lead author of th
NV path rendering
extension—a GPU-accelerated method for rendering

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...

.http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/video/S4810-accelerating-vector-graphics-mobile-web.mp4 Kilgard graduated from

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

. He has written two books: ''OpenGL for the X Window System'' (1996), and ''The Cg Tutorial'' (2003), co-authored with Randima Fernando.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Rice University alumni Computer science writers Silicon Graphics people American computer programmers Computer graphics professionals Nvidia people {{US-nonfiction-writer-stub