A new Beta driver has been made available by NVIDIA for the Linux platform

Aug 12, 2014 08:40 GMT  ·  By

The OpenGL 4.5 specifications have just been made public and it looks like NVIDIA is the first company to release a new driver that takes advantage of the new improvements.

The community has been waiting for OpenGL 5.0, but it looks like users will have to settle with a smaller version, although, from the looks of it, it's quite a big update. Maybe the version number is undeserving, but the update is here and NVIDIA is making the best of it.

To get an idea of what the new version brings, you must know that OpenGL 4.5 includes Direct State Access (allows the object accessors enable state to be queried and modified without binding objects to contexts), Flush Control (applications can control flushing of pending commands before context switching), Robustness (a secure platform for applications such as WebGL browsers), OpenGL ES 3.1 API and shader compatibility, and DX11 emulation features.

It's easy to understand why NVIDIA was quick to release a new Beta driver that supports the OpenGL 4.5 specifications, even if there is nothing out there that requires it, at least not now.

“The default OpenGL context provides OpenGL 4.5 on supported hardware. In addition, the application can use a specific version of OpenGL by calling CreateContextAttribsARB (for WGL and GLX defined in the WGL/GLX_ARB_create_context extensions). For OpenGL 3.2, and later versions including OpenGL 4.5, you can additionally specify what profile you want the OpenGL context to support. Either the ‘Core’ or the ‘Compatibility’ profile.”

“Together with OpenGL 3.0, the OpenGL ARB introduced a deprecation mechanism. Deprecation means that a feature is marked for removal from a future version of the OpenGL spec. It is not actually removed yet from OpenGL 3.0, but this means that future versions of OpenGL will remove features. Several features are marked as deprecated in the OpenGL 3.0 specification (but none are removed),” say the NVIDIA devs in the announcement.

As you can imagine, not all the NVIDIA GPUs will be able to support OpenGL 4.5. The new features in OpenGL 4.x will need a Fermi, Kepler, or Maxwell GPU. This means that OpenGL 4.x is not supported on NV3x, NV4x, G7x, G8x, or GT2xx hardware. Also, a number of Quadro GPUs will be able to run it, starting with Quadro K6000 upwards.

You can download the new NVIDIA 340.23.01 driver from the official website.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.