OpenGL 3D’s latest specification was recently released by the Khronos Group at SIGGRAPH 2011. The new OpenGL 4.2 spec integrates developer feedback and adds new functionality for developers to use and improve app performance. Among the larger improvemens, shader enabling now allows atomic counters and load, store, or atomic read-modify-write operations for a single level of texture.
Other new capabilities include GPU-tessellated capture and multiple drawing instances from transform feedback, modifying arbitrary subsets of a compressed texture without requiring re-downloading of the complete texture, and packing multiple 8-bit and 16-bit values into a single 32-bit value for better shader efficiency.
The 4.2 drivers are now available for download alongside NVIDIA’s OpenGL specs.
Khronos also called for more participants in its StreamInput and WebCL working groups. StreamInput focuses on cross-platform APIs for advanced sensor processing and user interaction, while WebCL works with JavaScript bindings to OpenCL, enabling parallel computing in HTML5 Web browsers.
