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:Progress

[ShoulderOfOrion]

Yes, if you do graphics/animation work (Blender and the like) or 3D CAD, or any of a number of other applications that need accelerated 3D graphics. Particularly if you'd like those apps to be cross-platform, not just on the desktops but on tablets, smartphones and the like.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[MightyMartian]

Translation; I'm an Apple fanboy and frequently string bunches of words together in shallow and lame attempts to defend Apple's retarded and idiotic positions.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mesa

[Anonymous Coward]

Great.. :-( one more version for Mesa to be behind of..

Re:Direct3D vs OpenGL

[peppepz]

OpenGL never caught on? I think you're talking from inside a Windows perception bubble, for everything but Windows is based on OpenGL nowadays. And Windows is slowly losing relevance.

Re:Progress

[91degrees]

Phones and tablets use OpenGL ES though. Which is related but different.

A new version of OpenGL isn't particularly relevant just yet. There was also an announcement of a new version of OpenGL ES

lets be clear about the hardware....

[Cutting_Crew]

if you have a fairly recent mac chances are the graphics hardware can do ALL the great OpenGL stuff. Thats what makes it even more puzzling. Its not that the hardware on these systems aren't there. There just isn't any drivers. Right now my macbook pro can perform all OpenGL 4.1 commands. But no drivers since Apple has been twiddling their thumbs.