What's New in OpenGL 4.3

The OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL Shading Language 4.30 Specifications were released on August 6, 2012.

New features of OpenGL 4.3 include:

compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation such as image, volume, and geometry processing within the context of the graphics pipeline;
shader storage buffer objects that enable vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment and compute shaders to read and write large amounts of data and pass significant data between shader stages;
texture parameter queries to discover actual supported texture parameter limits on the current platform;
high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
debug capability to receive debugging messages during application development;
texture views for interpreting textures in many different ways without duplicating the texture data itself;
indirect multi-draw that enables the GPU to compute and store parameters for multiple draw commands in a buffer object and re-use those parameters with one draw command, particularly efficient for rendering many objects with low triangle counts;
increased memory security that guarantees that an application cannot read or write outside its own buffers into another application’s data;
a multi-application robustness extension that ensures that an application that causes a GPU reset will not affect any other running applications.

Specifications and documentation for the OpenGL API and OpenGL Shading Language, as well as related APIs such as GLX, are available from OpenGL.org:

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Documentation

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