AMD Offers Support for OpenGL 4.0, 3.3 On Windows and Linux Platforms

Advanced Micro Devices (News - Alert), a provider of next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play, has announced that it will offer support for recently-published OpenGL versions for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux across its select ATI Radeon, ATI FirePro and ATI FireGL graphics cards.

The company will support OpenGL 4.0 on ATI Radeon HD 5900, HD 5800, HD 5700, HD 5600, HD 5500 and HD 5400 series graphics cards, while all discrete graphics products from AMD (News - Alert) including both consumer and professional graphics that have been released since the spring of 2007, will support OpenGL 3.3. AMD has made a beta driver available on its website, which will enable the new functionality.

The beta driver for OpenGL 4.0 and 3.3 offers full compatibility with the OpenGL 4.0 standard on AMD's most recent graphics products, the ATI Radeon HD 5900, HD 5800, HD 5700, HD 5600, HD 5500 and HD 5400 series, and promise a more flexible and productive workflow by offloading geometry tessellation from the CPU to the GPU. Further, it enables double precision processing on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5900 series graphics cards, which have been designed to enable more accurate modeling and higher quality rendering, applicable to both consumer and workstation uses. While OpenGL 4.0 is fully supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5400, HD 5500, HD 5600 and HD 5700 series graphics cards, double precision feature will be enabled for these products at a later date. The beta driver also offers seamless interoperability between OpenGL and OpenCL, or other external APIs.

According to Ben Bar-Haim, general manager, AMD Canada and corporate vice president, Software Engineering at AMD, the company's ability to support OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3 almost immediately after the release of their specifications is an incredible feat on the part of its OpenGL software team, and speaks volumes to the commitment and continued support for the many developers utilizing OpenGL. Bar-Haim continued that as a company that believes in and encourages open industry standards, maintaining OpenGL as a strong and viable graphics API is very important to AMD.

In March 2010, AMD announced a lineup of forthcoming motherboard and channel products for the AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform. The platform is based on the new AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor, also known as "Magny-Cours," and the AMD SR5690 chipset and will be the first 8- and 12-core x86 processor in the market. These processors included the new ASUS KGPE-D16 that is based on the AMD SR5690/SP5100 chipset and utilizes AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors to enable efficient performance to handle massive real-world workloads.