The Industry's Foundation for High Performance Graphics

Wit the newest AMD drivers (9.7, released yesterday) I was able to get a beta OpenGL 3.1 context. GLSL version still reported 1.30 though, but at least it seems progression is made on AMD's side (of course I was greedy and tried 3.2 as well... but that didn't work ;)).

I think well definitely will see geometry shaders, it's long overdue, also a bunch of EXT extensions once will also be merged to the core, maybe also a few new ones that makes life easier with glsl 1.4 especially regarding MRT/fbo and textures.
But outside of that maybe there will be some news on the texture object front.

Personally I would love to see 4 things:

Geometry shaders

Tessellation shaders

GPU/Video resources feedback queries

Proper way to enable FSAA

Strictly get rid of deprecated features, no deprecation mode enforced.

All,

The ARB will have an update on the state of OpenGL 3 at the OpenGL BOF at Siggraph on Wednesday 8/5.

Hope to see you there!

Barthold
(with my ARB hat on)

Yeah

Wish I could make it this year. Have a great show!

How can I join the ARB anyway?

By paying a lot of money. Check the Khronos website for instructions and requirements.

Direct3D made it be introducing a new kick-ass feature called GS, though not available on every HW at the time of release.

Lets have the ability to instantiate new fragments with different positions and possibly colors based on a fragment generated by the rasterizer.

Lets call it "Raster Shader"

Or make it part of the FS, by adding something like:

gl_NewFradCoord[1..MAX_FRAGS]
gl_NewFradColor[1..MAX_FRAGS]

MAX_FRAGS implementation dependent on how many frags can be instantiated per rasterizer fragment.

I think the idea that the ARB is going for with GL post 3.0 is that each major version number will involve adding features for next-generation graphics cards. So all versions of 3.x will run on basically the same hardware, while all versions of 4.x will run on higher-level hardware.

There will be extensions, whether ARB or whomever, that expose the next level of hardware before being incorporated into the core.