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OpenGL Version 4.3 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

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.

4 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. Progress by SplashMyBandit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thank goodness the Khronos Group took over from the old OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). There has been great progress in OpenGL since then, catching up to Direct3D which had come from behind. With this OpenGL we can have this goodness on all desktop (Windows including XP, Linux, Mac, Unix) and mobile computing platforms (iOS, iPad, Android). Personally I'm most looking forward to the improved debug message output - hopefully that should save me some time tearing my hair out trying to resolve my mental model of what is going on vs. the realities/subtleties of GPU programming.

  2. Apple and OpenGL by Cutting_Crew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When is apple going to get with the program related to 3D graphics? With Lion, they finally released drivers for OpenGL 3.3. Now, they are currently about 4 generations behind this new release. You would think, that with their success of their devices with fairly nice GPU's, that they would try to court gamers and developers. Let's face a hard truth. The most successful apps past and present are games. I know they want their drivers to be stable and all but they are way behind. I don't understand why they can't work with amd and nvidia on getting some stable driver releases...especially now with retina displays.

    Perhaps someone can explain what there thinking is here because I feel like they are missing out on some opportunities.

    1. Re:Apple and OpenGL by Ignacio · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My friends who deal with OpenGL on Mac on a nearly daily basis complain of bugs not a lack of features.

      ...

      HOLY SHIT!

      NOW I get it. Apple leaves the bugs in so that people focus on them instead of asking for new features! Then their product development group just throws whatever random features they feel like into a new product, and then tell the masses that they want to buy it. Brilliant!

  3. Direct3D vs OpenGL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I always wondered why OpenGL never caught on, until I read this explanation at stackexchange.