The Industry's Foundation for High Performance Graphics

Latest desktop GPU functionality now fully accessible through cross-platform open 3D standard; Close alignment with OpenCL for parallel compute, OpenGL ES for mobile graphics and new WebGL standard for 3D on the Web

The Khronos™ Group, today announced OpenGL® 3.2, the third major update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) for personal computers and workstations. This new release continues the rapid evolution of the OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

OpenGL 3.2 adds features for enhanced performance, increased visual quality, accelerated geometry processing and easier portability of Direct3D applications. In addition, the evolution of OpenGL and other standards within Khronos, including OpenCL™ for parallel compute, OpenGL ES for mobile 3D graphics and the new WebGL™ standard for 3D on the web are being coordinated to create a powerful graphics and compute ecosystem that spans many application, markets and devices. The installed base of OpenGL 3.2 compatible GPUs already exceeds 150 million units.

The OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos has defined GLSL 1.5, an updated version of the OpenGL Shading language, and two profiles within the OpenGL 3.2 specification providing developers the choice of using the streamlined Core profile for new application development or the Compatibility profile which provides full backwards compatibility with previous versions of the OpenGL standard for existing and workstation applications.

OpenGL 3.2 has been designed to run on a wide range of recent GPU silicon and provides a wide range of significant benefits to application developers, including:

• Increased performance for vertex arrays and fence sync objects to avoid idling while waiting for resources shared between the CPU and GPU, or multiple CPU threads;
• Improved pipeline programmability, including geometry shaders in the OpenGL core;
• Boosted cube map visual quality and multisampling rendering flexibility by enabling shaders to directly process texture samples.

In addition, Khronos has defined a set of five new ARB extensions that enable the very latest graphics functionality introduced in the newest GPUs to be accessed through OpenGL – these extensions will be absorbed into the core of a future version of OpenGL when this functionality is proven and widely adopted.
“Khronos has proven to be a great home for the OpenGL ARB,” stated Dr. Jon Peddie founder and principal of Jon Peddie Research. “Not only has the ARB has put the pedal to the metal to enable OpenGL to be a true platform for graphics innovation, but the synergy of coherently developing a family of related standards is leveraging OpenGL’s strengths - OpenGL is truly the foundation on which rich graphics for mobile devices and the Web is being built.”

Maybe the most interesting progress come from all these D3D 10.1 features provided by the new extensions!

GL_ARB_sync is such a good news ...

Again after OpenGL 3.1 release, I wasn't expecting that many new features!

Deep reading of the spec in progress!

I'm very happy to see where OpenGL is going, and makes me glad to see the release cycles gain so much importance recently. OpenGL is truly becoming relevant again in the multimedia and games industries.

Where anisotropy in core?

I have one question:

Can we assume that GL 3.2 functionality will be exposed in all GL 3.0 capable hardware?



Rob explained this here.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html

Q: What NVIDIA hardware will support OpenGL 3.0, OpenGL 3.1 or OpenGL 3.2?
A: The new features in OpenGL 3.0, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL 3.2 require G80, or newer hardware. Thus OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2 is not supported on NV3x, NV4x nor G7x hardware.

Wonderful now I have to spend my vacation reading the new specifics. I hate/love you, khronos.

By the way, maybe it's time to update the online documentation, it's still at 2.1 version. :-S

++

I'm generating C# bindings for the new specs as we speak.

My second impression: http://www.g-truc.net/#news0170

Thanks for fixing the LightProperty-instead-of-LightParameter error. This has been in the specs since the early SGI days!

A few more errors in the latest specs:
1. "R_SNORM" should be defined in VERSION_3_1 enum. However, it's value is not defined *anywhere*.
2. "TIMEOUT_IGNORED" is defined twice in VERSION_3_2 enum.
3. "2X_BIT_ATI" is defined twice in ATI_fragment_shader enum.
4. "FRAMEBUFFER_ATTACHMENT_TEXTURE_LAYER" is defined twice in FramebufferParameterName enum.
5. "RGB5" is defined twice in RenderbufferStorage enum.

Apart from the first issue (bug #195), the rest are not serious. However, it would be nice to have them fixed, if only to make spec converters, like the one that generates the C headers, simpler.