14 DAY TRIAL // Extra work, feedback and perseverance seem to have paid off for Khronos Group, whose latest press release reveals that the latest OpenGL specification has been completed.
OpenGL is one of the most widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics application programming interfaces (APIs) in the world.
Apparently, the ones driving the standard were not at all idle ever since they last came out to speak of their activities.
It turns out that Khronos Group, the OpenGL ARB (architecture review board) to be more exact, finished defining the newest version of the specification, OpenGL 4.2.
“AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences," said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president of AMD software development.
There are a number of things it can do, and this extends to more than updating the OpenGL shading language to GLSL 4.20.
For one, OpenGL can now modify an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture without having to re-download the entire texture to the GPU. This leads to higher performance.
Additionally, more advanced shaders were created, as was the capability to capture GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of a “transform feedback” so that complex objects can be easily replicated or repositioned.
Furthermore, a single 32-bit value can now pack multiple 8-bit and 16-bit values, leading to more efficient shader processing and lower pressure on memory and bandwidth.
“OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at Nvidia.
“As with previous OpenGL releases NVIDIA is committed to ship productized implementations as rapidly as possible after specification release. In fact, NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs.”