' Developer feedback has been key to creating a faster, more capable API that meets emerging needs, such as providing a secure platform for GPU-accelerated web applications using WebGL and compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation,' claimed Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at Nvidia. Additional programmer-friendly features introduced in OpenGL 4.3 include texture parameter queries for discovering the supported texture parameter limits on the current platform, an enhanced debug capability for receiving messages during development, texture views for interpreting textures in multiple ways without duplicating the texture data, and a multi-application robustness extension designed to ensure than an application causing a GPU reset won't affect any other running apps.įinally, the update adds an indirect multi-draw facility, enabling the GPU to compute and store parameters for multiple draw commands in a buffer object and re-use those parameters with a single draw command - resulting, the Khronos Group claims, in serious efficiency gains for the rendering of large low-triangle object quantities. Despite having only released OpenGL 4.2 last year, the Khronos Group has announced OpenGL 4.3 which brings with it some major new functionality designed to bring the fight to Microsoft's DirectX 11.1.įirst up is a new set of compute shaders, designed to allow programmers access to the highly-parallel processors in modern graphics card for tasks such as image, volume and geometry processing directly within the context of the graphics pipeline, along with shader storage buffer objects which enable vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment and compute shaders to read and write large amounts of data and pass big chunks between shader stages.Īddressing a big hole in OpenGL's feature set is the announcement of ETC2/EAC texture compression as a standard facility, meaning developers will no longer have to produce a different set of textures for each target platform.
The leading - and by leading, we mean pretty much only - alternative to Microsoft's Direct3D API, OpenGL has been around for a very long time: the standard is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The Khronos Group, the organisation behind the OpenGL graphics API, has announced the launch of new specifications for OpenGL and OpenGL ES as well as new APIs for augmented reality.
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