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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.

8 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.

    1. Re:Progress by SplashMyBandit · · Score: 5, Informative

      Do you have a phone or tablet? then OpenGL matters. If you use an operating system other than Windows, then OpenGL matters. If you like movies, then OpenGL matters. If you fly (OpenGL has implementations certified for flight instruments) then OpenGL matters. OpenGL is used for far more than just games, and far more widely than just the personal desktop.

  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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, I don't want to get too technical, but the situation is that Apple is retarded.

    2. 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. Re:Apple and OpenGL by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Informative

      When is apple going to get with the program related to 3D graphics? With Lion, they finally released drivers for OpenGL 3.3.

      No, they released it for GL 3.2 core, which is 1.1 generations behind the now current. The reason they did this is because they support this version of OpenGL on all hardware that Lion runs on. If you're coding for lion, you can guarentee that OpenGL 3.2 is there, and don't need to write multiple render paths like you do otherwise.

      Now the fun bit, and why it doesn't matter that they don't support GL 4.2 (or now 4.3)... OpenGL specs are in fact bundles of extensions. To make up the OpenGL 4.3 standard, they took a bunch of interesting looking OpenGL extensions, and said "in order to have a complete OpenGL 4.3 implementation you must implement these extensions without the prefixes". If you go code some OpenGL on a Mac, which has hardware that could support OpenGL 4.2, you will discover that the GL 3.2 core context that you have, in fact already includes all the extensions necessary to make up OpenGL 4.2, so while you have a GL 3.2 context, you can in fact do all the things you'd expect to do on that hardware.

      In short, a version number 1.1 less than the version number khronos are currently at makes very little difference to how well applications can be coded.

  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.

    1. Re:Direct3D vs OpenGL by peppepz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.