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OpenGL ES 3.2 & New Extensions Unveiled

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

An anonymous reader writes: With kicking off ACM SIGGRAPH '15, The Khronos Group came out with several big announcements, including the release of OpenGL ES 3.2 (which incorporates Android AEP functionality), confirmation that Google will support Vulkan on Android (when released), new desktop OpenGL extensions, and updates to the existing OpenCL 2.0 specification. They stopped short of releasing the heavily anticipated Vulkan Graphics API and also refrained from releasing a new desktop OpenGL version. They hope to have the Vulkan specification and its implementations released before year's end.

1 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenGL has lost its way by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Believe it or not, the world of graphics hardware and APIs has moved on substantially since 1999. What was a good API design then, is now far from it. These days, you can get an order of magnitude speed improvement from two major API changes from the current OpenGL one:
    1) Drop the state machine, and require states to be specified (and hence verified, and compiled) up front, rather than via a series of changes during drawing.
    2) Drop the inbuilt thread safety, and require the users of the API to implement correct thread safety themselves.

    These two changes together make a very very significant difference to the performance you can get out of a CPU/GPU pair. There's a very good reason why Microsoft went that way with D3D, Apple went that way with Metal, AMD went that way with Mantle, and now Kronos is going that way with Vulkan.