OpenGL 2.0 announced - specification expected by August 31st

Category: General •

Aug 11, 2004

The OpenGL Architecture Review Board announced the OpenGL 2.0 specification. New features of OpenGL 2.0 include:

• Programmable shading - With the new release, both OpenGL Shading Language and its APIs are now core features of OpenGL. New functionality includes the ability to create shader and program objects; and the ability to write vertex and fragment shaders in OpenGL Shading Language.
• Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass.
• Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption.
• Two-sided stencil with the ability to define stencil functionality for the front and back faces of primitives, improving performance of shadow volume and constructive solid geometry rendering algorithms.
• Point sprites which replace point texture coordinates with texture coordinates interpolated across the point. This allows drawing points as customized textures, useful for particle systems.