Khronos Group Announces Immediate Availability of Latest OpenGL 4.2 Specification

OpenGL - a well-known standard specification for writing applications that produce computer graphics – has long since served the graphics industry and has simplified the task of many graphics designers to a great extent.

The Khronos Group – a non-profit technology consortium that manages the OpenGL standard, recently announced the release of the latest OpenGL 4.2 specification at Siggraph 2011.

In general, OpenGL is a low-level, procedural application programming interface (API) used for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Precisely, any visual computing application requiring maximum performance, from 3D animation to CAD to visual simulation, can leverage the OpenGL API.

Providing the very latest graphics functionality, the OpenGL 4.2 cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games.

Defined by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) working group at Khronos, the OpenGL 4.2 specification includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. It also includes new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance.

Available immediately for download from the OpenGL website, OpenGL 4.2 facilitates shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture.

With the capability to capture GPU-tessellated geometry and draw multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback, the OpenGL 4.2 facilitates for complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated.

In addition, the OpenGL 4.2 provides developers with the capability to modify an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU, for significant performance improvements.

In addition, the OpenGL 4.2 allows graphics developers to pack multiple eight and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth. This feature is useful while transferring data between shader stages.

“AMD (News - Alert) plans to release our OpenGL 4.2 beta drivers with the publication of the OpenGL 4.2 specification,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, AMD Software Development, in a statement. “AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences.”

Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA (News - Alert), said in a statement, “NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs.”

Other Khronos standards apart from OpenGL include OpenGL ES, WebGL, WebCL, OpenCL, OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenSL ES, StreamInput and COLLADA.

In related news, SRS Labs (News - Alert) recently launched the industry's first Khronos OpenSL ES 1.1 audio solution for Android mobile devices at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert).