AMD Releases Catalyst Beta Drivers for OpenGL 4.2
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In case you missed it, AMD released a beta driver for the OpenGL 4.2 API specification just announced by the Khronos Group this week. The new AMD Catalyst Beta package for the OpenGL 4.2 API is available for download for use with the Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux operating systems. This announcement of OpenGL 4.2 really demonstrates the momentum and progress being driven by the Khronos Group. If you wanted to try the drivers here are the download links for both Windows and Linux.
New functionality for OpenGL 4.2 includes the following:
- Increased support for advanced techniques like single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency with the ability to enable shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. This can make it easier for developers to efficiently manage which objects are visible without requiring multiple rendering passes
- The ability to save cycles by capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result this means that complex objects can be efficiently replicated and repositioned
- A new feature to allow modification of an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to download the texture to the GPU again, which can enable significant performance improvements
- A full set of shader language features, including support for packing 8- and 16-bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth.
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