OpenGL Version 4.3 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The Khronos Group has released the specification for OpenGL 4.3 at the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in Los Angeles. New functionality includes: compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation, shader storage buffers, improved debug message output, high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, memory security improvements, robustness improvements, texture parameter queries, and more." The Khronos Group also released the OpenGL for Embedded Systems 3.0 specification, which is backwards-compatible with version 2.0. The new specification includes enhancements to the rendering pipeline, "a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations," and improved texturing functionality, among other things.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I don't want to get too technical, but the situation is that Apple is retarded.

Re:Progress

[SplashMyBandit]

Do you have a phone or tablet? then OpenGL matters. If you use an operating system other than Windows, then OpenGL matters. If you like movies, then OpenGL matters. If you fly (OpenGL has implementations certified for flight instruments) then OpenGL matters. OpenGL is used for far more than just games, and far more widely than just the personal desktop.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[perpenso]

Games don't generally require the latest hardware and software. Developers usually want to support anything sold in the last few years.

Ah, I see somebody has decided to begin talking out of his asshole.

Guess again. For example Mac Diablo 3 minimum system requirements:
Mac OS X 10.6.8
Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[beelsebob]

When is apple going to get with the program related to 3D graphics? With Lion, they finally released drivers for OpenGL 3.3.

No, they released it for GL 3.2 core, which is 1.1 generations behind the now current. The reason they did this is because they support this version of OpenGL on all hardware that Lion runs on. If you're coding for lion, you can guarentee that OpenGL 3.2 is there, and don't need to write multiple render paths like you do otherwise.

Now the fun bit, and why it doesn't matter that they don't support GL 4.2 (or now 4.3)... OpenGL specs are in fact bundles of extensions. To make up the OpenGL 4.3 standard, they took a bunch of interesting looking OpenGL extensions, and said "in order to have a complete OpenGL 4.3 implementation you must implement these extensions without the prefixes". If you go code some OpenGL on a Mac, which has hardware that could support OpenGL 4.2, you will discover that the GL 3.2 core context that you have, in fact already includes all the extensions necessary to make up OpenGL 4.2, so while you have a GL 3.2 context, you can in fact do all the things you'd expect to do on that hardware.

In short, a version number 1.1 less than the version number khronos are currently at makes very little difference to how well applications can be coded.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:OpenGL runs on Windows (did then, does now)

[alantus]

"Windows is slowly losing relevance" - by peppepz (1311345) on Wednesday August 08, @02:22AM (#40915185)

#1 Most Used/Biggest Marketshare on PC Desktops + Servers combined, & it's "losing relevance"? Then MacOS X + Linux never had it @ all, just based on the numbers, & don't argue with me - as the saying goes, "argue with the numbers": See here, "Read 'em & weep" -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems [wikipedia.org]

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Parent said "Windows is slowly losing relevance", the article you refer to shows current market share of operating systems, not change in time, so here are some relevant numbers you can argue with [statowl.com].
From September 2008 to April 2012:
Windows: 90.87% -> 84.13%
Mac: 8.69% -> 14.80%
Linux: 0.41% -> 0.86%

So it seems it is true that Windows is slowly losing relevance. In the same period of time Linux doubled its usage. And I suspect they are not taking into account mobile devices such as cellphones and tablets.

I've used AND created OpenGL screensavers for Windows since Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 - based on the OpenGL 2.1 standard

If your screensavers look anything like your posts, I'm not interested.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple was evil long before it was an empire.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Pino Grigio]

Well, here's the problem: the content pipeline. Most of the man-hours of work involved in putting a game like Skyrim together are artists, modellers, lighting gurus and animators. The actual coding of the engine itself is a big job yes, but content far outweighs it in terms of time. It's very hard to optimise content pipelines to take advantage of different techniques when it comes to 3D. What you tend to find at the moment is that most of it is designed to run with an earlier version, and there are a few effects added in using the later version. This shifts with the ubiquity of the hardware. That is why fixed function is deprecated or totally removed in current games, but GL 4/D3D 11 isn't really in widespread use in the industry as the baseline. It will be of course, just as soon as the percentage of users with that hardware goes above the bean-counters threshold.

Re:Progress

[pavon]

Well OpenGL ES wasn't good enough for the desktop. In addition to removing a bunch of old cruft they also removed a bunch of advanced features that embedded systems at the time couldn't handle. OpenGL ES 3.0 improves the situation quite a bit, and is at least a proper subset of OpenGL 4.3, but is still missing important features needed to get the best performance out of games.