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.

Progress

[SplashMyBandit]

Thank goodness the Khronos Group took over from the old OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). There has been great progress in OpenGL since then, catching up to Direct3D which had come from behind. With this OpenGL we can have this goodness on all desktop (Windows including XP, Linux, Mac, Unix) and mobile computing platforms (iOS, iPad, Android). Personally I'm most looking forward to the improved debug message output - hopefully that should save me some time tearing my hair out trying to resolve my mental model of what is going on vs. the realities/subtleties of GPU programming.

Apple and OpenGL

[Cutting_Crew]

When is apple going to get with the program related to 3D graphics? With Lion, they finally released drivers for OpenGL 3.3. Now, they are currently about 4 generations behind this new release. You would think, that with their success of their devices with fairly nice GPU's, that they would try to court gamers and developers. Let's face a hard truth. The most successful apps past and present are games. I know they want their drivers to be stable and all but they are way behind. I don't understand why they can't work with amd and nvidia on getting some stable driver releases...especially now with retina displays.

Perhaps someone can explain what there thinking is here because I feel like they are missing out on some opportunities.

Direct3D vs OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered why OpenGL never caught on, until I read this explanation at stackexchange [stackexchange.com].

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a game developer. That is complete and utter bullshit.

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. I think most developers would prefer that Apple fix bugs and inconsistencies in the older versions of OpenGL (and video drivers) rather than implement the latest OpenGL. In other words I think many developers would say Apple is behind in bug fixes not new features.

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.

Guess again. I worked at a game developer for years, including the Mac development side. I am a bit familiar with the process of deciding minimum system requirements. My friends who deal with OpenGL on Mac on a nearly daily basis complain of bugs not a lack of features.

Just curious, but you consider someone complaining about problems with the current OpenGL implementation on Mac to be a fanboy? That's a pretty interesting perspective you have there.

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[Ignacio]

My friends who deal with OpenGL on Mac on a nearly daily basis complain of bugs not a lack of features.

...

HOLY SHIT!

NOW I get it. Apple leaves the bugs in so that people focus on them instead of asking for new features! Then their product development group just throws whatever random features they feel like into a new product, and then tell the masses that they want to buy it. Brilliant!

Re:Apple and OpenGL

[perpenso]

Suffice to say that I have about 6 years of professional experience.

10+ years here, and that's not counting pre-historic 8- and 16-bit days.

My current company is a fairly large cross platform developer. Unfortunately, we have to support Mac OS.

Cross platform here too.

The problem is that their archaic implementation of OpenGL is barely capable of running last generation console games.

There is the difference. Porting from Windows vs porting from console. What I hear from the current Mac dev guys is generally complaints related to bugs. Bugs that are reported, not fixed patch after patch, bugs they have to work around depending on the specific video chipset.

Re:Direct3D vs OpenGL

[bcmm]

OpenGL never caught on? That must be why iOS and Android gaming is dead and most new mobile games are written in XNA and released only for Windows Phone 7 these days.