Full backwards compatibility maintained; API specification and reference documentation available now
LOS ANGELES — (BUSINESS WIRE) — August 6, 2012 — The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.3 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface). OpenGL 4.3 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification while maintaining full backwards compatibility, enabling applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The OpenGL 4.3 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.
Twenty years since the release of the original OpenGL 1.0, the new OpenGL 4.3 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.30 update to the OpenGL Shading Language.
New functionality in the OpenGL 4.3 specification includes:
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compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation
such as image, volume, and geometry processing within the context of the
graphics pipeline;
- shader storage buffer objects that enable
vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment and compute shaders to read and
write large amounts of data and pass significant data between shader
stages;
- texture parameter queries to discover actual supported
texture parameter limits on the current platform;
- high quality
ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the
need for a different set of textures for each platform;
- debug
capability to receive debugging messages during application development;
-
texture views for interpreting textures in many different ways without
duplicating the texture data itself;
- indirect multi-draw that
enables the GPU to compute and store parameters for multiple draw
commands in a buffer object and re-use those parameters with one draw
command, particularly efficient for rendering many objects with low
triangle counts;
- increased memory security that guarantees that
an application cannot read or write outside its own buffers into another
application’s data;
- a multi-application robustness extension that
ensures that an application that causes a GPU reset will not affect any
other running applications.
“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,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA released beta OpenGL 4.3 drivers today, so developers can immediately use this new functionality on NVIDIA desktop GPUs.” (More information at http://www.nvidia.com/content/devzone/opengl-driver-4.3.html)
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Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2012 |
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Wednesday, August 8th at the JW Marriott Los Angeles at LA Live held in the Gold Ballroom, Salon 3: |
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| News Conference | 1-2PM | Headlines of all Khronos news announcements at SIGGRAPH | ||
| COLLADA BOF | 2-3PM | Latest community updates on the open standard for 3D asset interchange | ||
| OpenCL BOF | 3-4PM | OpenCL 1.2 overview, utilities, vendor updates & developer perspective | ||
| WebGL BOF | 4-5PM | Community updates, latest techniques and demos for 3D on the Web | ||
| OpenGL ES | 5-6PM | Updates to the world’s most popular 3D API | ||
| OpenGL BOF | 6-7PM | The latest on the OpenGL 3D ecosystem | ||
| OpenGL Party | 7-10PM | Beer, basketball and prizes celebrating OpenGL’s 20th Anniversary | ||
Visit Khronos at booths #658 and #759 to see members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.
About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.
Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVL, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
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