As some of you know, I've been tinkering with 3D codes for quite a while. Never produced anything tooo worth showing off yet, but I've got some things coming relatively soon. I'm a big fan of the Khronos Group and their OpenGL platforms for several reasons, so this announcement got me a little excited. I'm not going to be using any of these sweet new features any time soon myself, since I'm basically a novice at the 3D codes, but I'm excited by the continued innovation. Obviously this is partially as a reaction to DirectX 11, what with the tessellation features and all, but good times!

March 11, 2010 – San Francisco, GDC 2010 –The Khronos^TM Group today announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification; a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is deployed on all major desktop operating systems. OpenGL 4.0 brings the very latest in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality to personal computers and workstations and the OpenGL standard serves as the basis for OpenGL® ES, the graphics standard on virtually every shipping smart phone.

The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration with significantly enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility. This new release continues the rapid evolution of the royalty-free OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

OpenGL 4.0 further improves the close interoperability with OpenCL^TM for accelerating computationally intensive visual applications. OpenGL 4.0 also continues support for both the Core and Compatibility profiles first introduced with OpenGL 3.2, enabling developers to use a streamlined API or retain backwards compatibility for existing OpenGL code, depending on their market needs.

OpenGL 4.0 has been specifically designed to bring significant benefits to application developers, including:

• two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU;

• per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility;

• drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention;

• shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;

• separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects;

• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality;

• performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.

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