The Khronos Group today announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification, an update to the 2D and 3D cross-platform graphics API (application programming interface).
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.
Khronos has simultaneously released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware; providing maximum flexibility and platform coverage for application developers. The full OpenGL 3.3 specification is also available for immediate download at OpenGL.org.
The Khronos Group announced also that the COLLADA 1.4 Adopters Package is complete and under final review prior to public release (anticipated in April, 2010). The Adopters Package contains both conformance testing software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the COLLADA specification in 3D content creation, and asset management software.
The COLLADA specification defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information, enabling multiple software packages to be combined into tool chains. The COLLADA 1.4 Adopters Package and
conformance tests are designed to provide distinct levels of conformance and specification adherence that informs users about the suitability of a software authoring environment for use in a COLLADA tool chain. More at COLLADA.org.
