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OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 14:25 by the Fiddler

Khronos has just announced the release of the OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0 specifications. New features include:

  • Improved interoperability with OpenCL
  • Tessellation shaders
  • More flexible fragment shaders
  • Shader subroutines
  • 64bit precision data types
  • sampler objects (finally!)

OpenGL 4.0 presumably requires DX11-level hardware, while OpenGL 3.3 will remain compatible with DX10-level GPUs.

OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 support will land in OpenTK 1.1.

Official announcement: opengl.org.


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nythrix's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 15:49 by nythrix

OpenGL 4.0???
Whoa!

kvark's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 17:02 by kvark

It's stunning to see the GLSL version number jumping from 1.50 to 4.0 in a second...
However, I hope the changes are for good, now trying to recover from the initial shock (tesselation, subroutines, samplers).

the Fiddler's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 17:11 by the Fiddler

I'm skimming the 3.3 specs and so far everything feels like an incremental improvement over 3.2. Encouraging to see features requested by the community make it into the standard: samplers, extended blend, #include directives. No deprecated features, which means the the design of 3.2 was solid.

Anyone read the 4.0 specs yet?

golkeeper's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 19:50 by golkeeper

very.. suddenly
Does anybody now what hardware is OpenGl4 capable ?

nythrix's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 20:03 by nythrix

Although it's nice to see Khronos do what's it supposed to do I'm a bit worried. In a year and a half Khronos managed to release FIVE versions and each specifies its own core/deprecated/removed features. Are they trying to catch up with DirectX history?

the Fiddler's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 20:15 by the Fiddler

Thankfully, 3.3 doesn't deprecate/remove anything else. Khronos seems to feel the core 3.2 design is more or less alright (and it actually is, as long as you disregard the bind-to-edit approach).

Inertia's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 20:53 by Inertia

This is good news, I was kinda hoping for direct state access to become part of 4.0 but obviously this isn't going to happen until someone makes the call that it should not deal with fixed-func ;)

Any rumors whether the GL 4.0 tesselation shaders will be available on older cards of Ati's HD series (i.e. DX 10.1 cards)? Those already support a HW tesselation extension and a DX 11 card may not be required.

the Fiddler's picture

Re: OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

Posted Thursday, 11 March, 2010 - 22:19 by the Fiddler

And the 4.0 reference card is now available. Nice!

Edit: new functions seem to be using a more DSA-like API, which is good. Yes, this introduces an amount of inconsistency, but ultimately it moves the spec towards a more sane & usable interface.

Edit 2: the generator is able to parse the 4.0 specs just fine, doing some sanity checks now and will commit to trunk soon.