Similarly as it was in the last year, Khronos announced new version of OpenGL at SIGGRAPH 2013. This time it is only a minor update - there are no big features in this release. This version completes the OpenGL 4 and now we can hopefully wait for the OpenGL 5.0
Aditionally we have new OpenCL 2.0 as well so it is another great things from Khronos.
Aditionally we have new OpenCL 2.0 as well so it is another great things from Khronos.
Links
At first some links to look for more info:
- OpenGL 4.4 post by g-truc -as usual a review from G-Truc
- http://www.opengl.org/registry/ - the source of all info
- https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-driver - NVidia with their 4.4 drivers! AMD is a little bit behind.
- http://www.opengl.org/Official-feedback-on-OpenGL-4-4-thread - forum thread about new release
My view
Several items that gained my attention:
- GL_ARB_multi_bind - Ability to bind multiple objects at once.
GLuint texIDs[N] = { tex0, tex1, tex2, ... }
glBindTextures(0, N, texIDS);
This will do: glActiveTexImage(GL_TEXTURE0);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex0);
glActiveTexImage(GL_TEXTURE1);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex1);
...
glActiveTexImage(GL_TEXTUREN);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texN);
- GL_ARB_clear_texture- clears a texture, without having to render to it using FBO or copy data from client's memory. Very nice and intuitive way of doing it.
- GL_ARB_buffer_storage, GL_ARB_vertex_type_10f_11f_11f_rev, GL_ARB_texture_mirror_clamp_to_edge - those quite simple features can help when porting apps from DirectX.
- GL_ARB_buffer_storage - adding immutability to buffers. I still need to dig how that's useful and what implications does it have.
Conclusion
Those changes make developer's life a bit easier, but they are not a breakthrough. They all complete OpenGL 4.0 functionality. Hopefully extensions like sparse_textures and bindless_texture were promoted to ARB, so maybe we will see them in core of OpenGL 5.0.
By the way 1: NVidia made a patent out of bindless_texture, I wonder how will it complicate moving this extension to the opengl core.
By the way 2: it is positively surprised that some people from Poland (from Intel - Gdansk) were mentioned in the credits page!