The Khronos Group has launched an update to 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) OpenGL 4.0 specification, which it claims to bring new in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality to personal computers and workstations.
According to Khronos, the OpenGL 4.0 includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the new generation of GPU acceleration with enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility. It will also improve the interoperability with OpenCL for enhancing computationally intensive visual applications.
Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at Nvidia, said: “OpenGL 4.0 continues the ARB’s schedule-driven roll-out of new functionality, and this significant major release enables developers to access leading-edge GPU functionality across multiple platforms with full backwards compatibility.
“OpenGL continues to be a keystone in the Khronos API ecosystem, through driving innovation into OpenGL ES and WebGL to bring high-performance programmable graphics to mobile platforms and the web, and by interoperating with OpenCL to create a seamless visual and compute platform for application developers.”
The company said that the OpenGL 4.0 includes two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; and per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility.
In addition, the new version offers 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and performance improvements including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.
Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware.
Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of design engineering at AMD, said: “AMD sees the release of OpenGL 4.0 as another major accomplishment for the OpenGL ARB. AMD contributes to the Khronos workgroups, and we consistently find that Khronos is successful at developing healthy, thriving, and evolving open standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL.”
