I've been working on an OpenGL-compatible build of Transcendence for a bit over a year now, and I've got to the point where just about everything worth accelerating via GPU has been implemented in GPU. This was originally meant to make my total-conversion mod, Starborne Memory (sometimes known as IA - don't ask why) work, due to how graphics-heavy that mod is, and because of the potential for new special effects that using GPU has.
Note that certain old "legacy" effects, like `starBurst` are not implemented in GPU; only <Orb>, <Particle> and <Ray> (and <Image>) are.
With George's blessing, I've put precompiled binaries of OpenGL Transcendence on my Github at https://github.com/exinfinitum/Transcen ... mpiled.zip, filesize around 130 MB
after downloading, need to extract to a folder,
Additional downloads are not necessary for the latest OpenGL build.
Coupled with most decent modern-day discrete GPUs, this should dramatically accelerate rendering when there's lots of objects on the screen, or with very large ships, to the point where CPU becomes the bottleneck. I will be updating this build regularly with the latest changes from George's Github, as well as my changes to the Transcendence OpenGL code.
Edit: spelling
Edit: latest OpenGL build no longer requires download of glew32.dll