OpenGL Version 4.3 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The Khronos Group has released the specification for OpenGL 4.3 at the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in Los Angeles. New functionality includes: compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation, shader storage buffers, improved debug message output, high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, memory security improvements, robustness improvements, texture parameter queries, and more." The Khronos Group also released the OpenGL for Embedded Systems 3.0 specification, which is backwards-compatible with version 2.0. The new specification includes enhancements to the rendering pipeline, "a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations," and improved texturing functionality, among other things.

Comments

Re:Direct3D vs OpenGL

[peppepz]

OpenGL never caught on? I think you're talking from inside a Windows perception bubble, for everything but Windows is based on OpenGL nowadays. And Windows is slowly losing relevance.

lets be clear about the hardware....

[Cutting_Crew]

if you have a fairly recent mac chances are the graphics hardware can do ALL the great OpenGL stuff. Thats what makes it even more puzzling. Its not that the hardware on these systems aren't there. There just isn't any drivers. Right now my macbook pro can perform all OpenGL 4.1 commands. But no drivers since Apple has been twiddling their thumbs.