OpenGL 4.0 Spec Released

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit, double-precision, floating-point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous-generation GPU hardware."

Comments

Patent problems still there?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Any chance the patent problems of OpenGL 3 have been fixed?

Re:DOA for anything but pro gear

[aristotle-dude]

DirectX won, because it does sound and HID input handling, and because its on every PC sold to every mouthbreathing, Best Buy shopping, banana eating customer.

OpenGL is used on PS3, linux and OS X. It is also used on any game in windows that is cross platform compatible where they did not bother implementing a DirectX engine. Every platform now has HID handling and you can use OpenAL if you want to have the same sound effects engine on windows, OS X and possibly linux.

Now that Valve is porting Steam and related games to OS X and consequently OpenGL, expect to see more activity surrounding OpenGL.