OpenGL 4.0 released

[argor]

http://www.khronos.org/news/pr...acceleration-opengl4

Khronos Unleashes Cutting-Edge, Cross-Platform Graphics Acceleration with OpenGL 4.0

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Media Contacts:

Jonathan Hirshon, Principal, Horizon PR
jh@horizonpr.com
Phone: +1 (408) 393-4900

Open standard 3D API specification available immediately; Provides performance, quality and flexibility enhancements including tessellation and double precision shaders; Tight integration with OpenCL for seamless visual computing

March 11, 2010 – San Francisco, GDC 2010 –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 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™ 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.

Lastly, 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 http://www.opengl.org/registry

“The release of OpenGL 4.0 is a major step forward in bringing state-of-the-art functionality to cross-platform graphics acceleration, and strengthens OpenGL’s leadership position as the epicenter of 3D graphics on the web, on mobile devices as well as on the desktop,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is pleased to announce that its upcoming Fermi-based graphics accelerators will fully support OpenGL 4.0 at launch.”

“AMD sees the release of OpenGL 4.0 as another major accomplishment for the OpenGL ARB,” said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of design engineering at AMD. “AMD contributes to the Khronos workgroups, and we consistently find that Khronos is successful at developing healthy, thriving, and evolving open standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL.”

“OpenGL 4.0 continues the ARB’s schedule-driven roll-out of new functionality, and this significant major release enables developers to access leading-edge GPU functionality across multiple platforms with full backwards compatibility,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA. “OpenGL continues to be a keystone in the Khronos API ecosystem, through driving innovation into OpenGL ES and WebGL™ to bring high-performance programmable graphics to mobile platforms and the Web, and by interoperating with OpenCL to create a seamless visual and compute platform for application developers.”
Learn about OpenGL 4.0 and Khronos APIs at Game Developer Conference Room 123, North Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco:
OpenCL Thursday, March 11 1:30PM – 2:30PM
OpenGL featuring WebGL Thursday, March 11 3:00PM – 4:00PM
COLLADA featuring WebGL Friday, March 12 1:30PM – 2:30PM
Mobile featuring WebGL Friday, March 12 3:00PM – 4:00PM
About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, EGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org .

 

[Elledan]

In short:

OpenGL 3.3 will allow full usage of the older generation (AMD HD4xxx, GT200(b)) based videocards.
OpenGL 4 gives full access to the features on the new-gen cards (HD5xxx, Fermi).

OpenGL 4 also brings official feature-parity with DirectX 11. OpenGL 3.x with extensions already did pretty much everything of it already.

 

[Valset]

an hour late and a dollar short. I am sure that it will be useful but they seem to be running a few steps behind again

 

[Elledan]

an hour late and a dollar short. I am sure that it will be useful but they seem to be running a few steps behind again

Why are you saying that? Speaking as a game developer whose company uses an OpenGL-based game engine (in-house), we haven't run into any major features in DX11 we'd dearly love to see in OGL 3.x. Tesselation is cute, but takes up a lot of precious development time, and reduces framerates significantly. It's not something to be used lightly until we're at least one more generation of GPUs ahead of what we have now.

Hardware tesselation has also been available with OpenGL via extensions since around 2006 if not sooner. In truth it's always DX which is behind on everything. It's only if you just consider the OpenGL (ARB) specification that you may get the idea that OpenGL is lagging. AMD, Intel, nVidia, many big-name game studios and more keep adding new OGL-extensions very regularly, ensuring it stays up to date.

 

[Conker]

Opengl should be used more. Games would work on all platforms. If developers did use it more we'd see more movement from microsoft on the pc.

 

[Asacolips]

Here's hoping steam on the Mac encourages more games to use OpenGL.

 

[heatlesssun]

In truth it's always DX which is behind on everything.

Except actual games so no matter how advanced the API is or is not is irrelavent. And

 

[DontBeEvil]

OpenGL all the way, at least in Unreal Tournament

 

[mike_j_johnson]

I never really thought of this before, but should we be updating OpenGL regularly just like DirectX? I know that Microsoft releases updates for DirectX every few months which I promptly download and install.

 

[kllrnohj]

I never really thought of this before, but should we be updating OpenGL regularly just like DirectX? I know that Microsoft releases updates for DirectX every few months which I promptly download and install.

As long as you keep your drivers up to date you're keeping your OpenGL install up to date as well. Also, there really isn't any point in downloading the new DX releases. Games are developed against a specific release and only call that specific release. So installing a newer version is only good at using up disk space. It will go completely unused until you install a game coded against that specific release - and that game will have that version of DX bundled in the installer anyway.

In truth it's always DX which is behind on everything.

Not true at all. OpenGL's vendor specific extensions do keep OpenGL up to date faster than the ARB extensions, yes, but DX is the one driving the new feature sets in the first place. DX drives the feature set which gets the features in the hardware which then gets vendor specific extensions in OGL. And new versions of DX are usually out before the hardware is anyway, putting OGL even further behind.

The problem with OGL is that its focus is too split between the needs of games and the needs of CAD and professional uses. It sucks that Long Peak decided to suck instead of forging ahead and making OGL a real player again.

 

[SicKlown42012]

As long as you keep your drivers up to date you're keeping your OpenGL install up to date as well. Also, there really isn't any point in downloading the new DX releases. Games are developed against a specific release and only call that specific release. So installing a newer version is only good at using up disk space. It will go completely unused until you install a game coded against that specific release - and that game will have that version of DX bundled in the installer anyway.

In theory you're right. But there's no shortage of people who have fixed various issues with games by downloading and installing the newest DX from Microsoft's website. I think it's always nice to have it around just in case you run into one of these scenarios. All you need is the web based setup which takes up just about no room.

 

[Elledan]

Not true at all. OpenGL's vendor specific extensions do keep OpenGL up to date faster than the ARB extensions, yes, but DX is the one driving the new feature sets in the first place. DX drives the feature set which gets the features in the hardware which then gets vendor specific extensions in OGL. And new versions of DX are usually out before the hardware is anyway, putting OGL even further behind.

Isn't it more a combination of both? I mean, Tesla/Quadro cards are using the same chips as the consumer cards, and professional cards would benefit more from having the latest features, including extensions.

Fermi also includes a lot of features which DX will never use, but which is of great benefit to GPGPU, so there are more factors at work than just what the next DX version will need. AMD and nVidia implemented hardware tesselation years ago long before DX began to use it, with OpenGL supporting it via extensions.

 

[Hornet]

In short:

OpenGL 3.3 will allow full usage of the older generation (AMD HD4xxx, GT200(b)) based videocards.
OpenGL 4 gives full access to the features on the new-gen cards (HD5xxx, Fermi).

OpenGL 4 also brings official feature-parity with DirectX 11. OpenGL 3.x with extensions already did pretty much everything of it already.

Ah, thanks for the quick summary

I was about to ask which GPU today support what OpenGL version

Hardly heard of them these days

 

[Elledan]

Ah, thanks for the quick summary

I was about to ask which GPU today support what OpenGL version

Hardly heard of them these days

Windows games pretty much exclusively use DX, and non-console titles are pretty much exclusively released on Windows, so it's not surprising that OpenGL doesn't get much time in the limelight, let alone reviews.

This may change with Valve going to release all of its games for OS X as well, which can only use OpenGL. OpenGL support was added to the Source engine for this reason, and for developers wanting to release their titles on both Windows and OS X it may be attractive to use OpenGL for both versions. There is no penalty for using OpenGL on Windows.

 

[Conker]

Some of the best games that have came out in the past have used opengl. Quake3, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty 1 & UO, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 99, and a lot of other ones.

 

[heatlesssun]

Windows games pretty much exclusively use DX, and non-console titles are pretty much exclusively released on Windows, so it's not surprising that OpenGL doesn't get much time in the limelight, let alone reviews.

This may change with Valve going to release all of its games for OS X as well, which can only use OpenGL. OpenGL support was added to the Source engine for this reason, and for developers wanting to release their titles on both Windows and OS X it may be attractive to use OpenGL for both versions. There is no penalty for using OpenGL on Windows.

You're forgetting about the XBox. You have to write DX code for it and you might as well port that to Windows.

 

[Elledan]

You're forgetting about the XBox. You have to write DX code for it and you might as well port that to Windows.

Nah, while the XBox uses a DX-inspired API it is nothing like DX. It is easy to port at best, but not directly compatible. Even OpenGL and OpenGL ES are much closer related.

 

[R3MF]

good news.

openGL was lost in the wilderness in the 2.x days, so i am delighted that the 3.x and 4.x series are coming out so promptly these days.

it is ALWAYS a good thing to keep D3D on its toes
it is ALWAYS a good thing to have a cross platform API

 

[Parmenides]

I'm not up on consoles; what about the PS3 since the 360 must be quasi-DX? what sort of API?

 

[Elledan]

I'm not up on consoles; what about the PS3 since the 360 must be quasi-DX? what sort of API?

OpenGL ES on the PS3 and Wii. Also DS, iPhone and pretty much everything else except for the X360

 

[argor]

I'm not up on consoles; what about the PS3 since the 360 must be quasi-DX? what sort of API?

if i remember rite the wii has a opengl like api wile the ps3 has 2 options OpenGL ES
and CTM (Close-To-Metal)

 

[Parmenides]

OpenGL ES on the PS3 and Wii. Also DS, iPhone and pretty much everything else except for the X360

So that means that many PC games (like DA:O, ME2, etc..) are already being written for OpenGL.... on the PS3.

 

[kllrnohj]

Isn't it more a combination of both? I mean, Tesla/Quadro cards are using the same chips as the consumer cards, and professional cards would benefit more from having the latest features, including extensions.

Fermi also includes a lot of features which DX will never use, but which is of great benefit to GPGPU, so there are more factors at work than just what the next DX version will need. AMD and nVidia implemented hardware tesselation years ago long before DX began to use it, with OpenGL supporting it via extensions.

Well, neither OpenGL nor DirectX drove GPGPU, but I was more talking about features used by games (which is what most people here care about). Both can now use GPGPU, however. DX through the ComputeShader and OpenGL through OpenCL. Nvidia never had hardware tessellation, Fermi is Nvidia's first card with hardware tessellation. Tessellation is more an exception in this case, sort of. Tessellation in OpenGL is a vendor extension that was never adopted as part of the spec, and is from back in the day when OpenGL vs. DX battle was still in full swing. But there are actually 2 fixed function tessellation pipelines in AMD's cards. The one that has been available via an extension in OpenGL is limited to 16 steps. DX11's tessellation is limited to 64 steps, and access to that fixed function pipeline in OpenGL for AMD cards came out after DX11. So in the case of tessellation it would almost be like OpenGL gave us a preview with DX coming along and improving it. Which just goes to demonstrate how far OpenGL has fallen - it couldn't even standardize and improve on something that already existed much less entirely new features.

I'm not up on consoles; what about the PS3 since the 360 must be quasi-DX? what sort of API?

If you're doing real time 3D and the OS isn't made by Microsoft then its OpenGL

 

[Elledan]

Well, OpenGL was kind of frozen in time with the 2.x spec, as nobody seemed to be willing to take up the slack. It's the disadvantage of a specification by committee, I guess. Now it seems Khronos is back on track, churning out new specifications faster than most seem to be able to keep up with. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be Khronos which will be giving MSFT a run for its money next time

 

[kllrnohj]

Well, OpenGL was kind of frozen in time with the 2.x spec, as nobody seemed to be willing to take up the slack. It's the disadvantage of a specification by committee, I guess. Now it seems Khronos is back on track, churning out new specifications faster than most seem to be able to keep up with. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be Khronos which will be giving MSFT a run for its money next time

Maybe. Khronos did totally screw up the 3.0 release. Took forever and when it did came out all the really cool things were completely gone. It was just another 2.x release.

 

[Elledan]

Maybe. Khronos did totally screw up the 3.0 release. Took forever and when it did came out all the really cool things were completely gone. It was just another 2.x release.

Well, D3D is only used for games, really. OpenGL is used for professional (CAD) applications as well, so Khronos had to compromise on a hugely different few sets of wishing lists. One wants everything rebuilt from scratch, the other prefers to keep things backwards compatible. The depreciation mode in 3.x wasn't such a bad trade-off in that regard. At least some dead wood got the axe.

When it comes to developers, nobody will ever be happy with anything, though

 

[jimmyb]

Not true at all. OpenGL's vendor specific extensions do keep OpenGL up to date faster than the ARB extensions, yes, but DX is the one driving the new feature sets in the first place.

MS is a large driver sure, but input for hardware features is taken from a variety of sources, some of them third party, some in-house.

 

[socK]

So that means that many PC games (like DA:O, ME2, etc..) are already being written for OpenGL.... on the PS3.

PS3 generally uses libGCM, not OGL

 

[butterfliesrpretty]

Opengl should be used more. Games would work on all platforms. If developers did use it more we'd see more movement from microsoft on the pc.

amotherfuckinmen

opengl leading the way almost always and it's open source, yet people still use directx far more....

 

[Commander Suzdal]

I really miss the days when many games supported both API's and you could choose whichever one performed/looked best on your hardware. Back when I was playing Homeworld, DX mode was buggy and rough on my machine and OGL worked like a charm.

Even further back, when I was still trying to keep my Amiga 4000T alive as my main machine during the days when there was a sliver of hope for the brand being revived, I was able to play ports of Doom, Quake, and Descent because they supported OGL (and of course because Mac versions existed that were compiled to run on Motorola 68000-series CPUs, making the porting much simpler). And that's another point for portability--now that the tables have turned and Mac's are using PC hardware, the graphics API is the only piece missing for easy game conversion.