Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.0 Specification
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The Khronos 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 used 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. The OpenGL standard also serves as the basis for OpenGL ES, the graphics standard on virtually every shipping smart phone.
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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