Khronos Unleashes Cutting-Edge, Cross-Platform Graphics Acceleration with OpenGL 4.0

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The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification. This is a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language allowing developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration. OpenGL 4.0 further improves the close interoperability with OpenCL™ for accelerating computationally intensive visual applications. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware. The latest specifications can be downloaded today in OpenGL Registry. An official feedback forum is online at the OpenGL Forums.

AMD’s Haemel summarizes what is new OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0

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Mar 11, 2010

AMD’s Nick Haemel blogs about some of the more significant features and benefits in OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0. The simultaneous release breathes new life into existing hardware while also paving the way for next generation GPUs.

Graphic Remedy launches gDEBugger CL at GDC 2010

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Mar 10, 2010

Graphic Remedy, a leading provider of advanced solutions for 3D graphics developers, launched gDEBugger CL at Game Developer Conference 2010. gDEBugger CL allows OpenCL™-based application developers to deliver complex parallel computing applications and significantly improve application performance. gDEBugger CL offers advanced debugging, profiling and memory analysis capabilities that reduce development time, accelerate time to market, help deploy the application on multiple platforms and boost application parallel computing performance. gDEBugger CL supports OpenGL-OpenCL interoperability and works together with gDEBugger GL to display, in a single GUI system, both OpenGL’s and OpenCL’s debugging and profiling data.

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 beta-3 released

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Mar 09, 2010

The Open Toolkit library is an open-source wrapper that allows .Net/Mono applications to use OpenGL¸ OpenAL and OpenCL. This release improves stability under multi-threading scenarios, introduces a new multithreading sample, improves inline (intellisense) and hardcopy (PDF) documentation and fixes a large number of secondary issues. The Open Toolkit can be used on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and *BSD and is especially suitable to rapid development of games, GUIs, virtual reality and scientific visualizations.

Valve source engine overhauled to carry OpenGL

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Mar 09, 2010

Steam’s Source engine – which powers all of Valve’s games – has been overhauled to carry OpenGL so that the Bellevue-based studio can now provide Mac owners with native versions of hit properties such as Half-Life. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development.

ZGameEditor v1.9.9 for developing small and efficient OpenGL API-based games and applications

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Mar 08, 2010

ZGameEditor is a free game authoring tool that generates native high-performance stand-alone compact executables for Win32, Linux x86 and OS X. Now 3 years after initial release ZGameEditor has reached version 1.9.9 and it’s the most feature packed update yet! ZGameEditor is an ideal tool for experimenting with procedural content generation techniques and developing OpenGL-applications. Make games, demos and screen savers using advanced graphics features such as multiple render passes, render targets and shaders. Instant GUI feedback of your changes. No waiting for build times! ZGameEditor is free, Open Source software. New features in 1.9.9 include: - render to texture - multiple render passes - web-connectivity - string support in scripting language - calling external libraries - and many other improvements.

Simtech releases OpenGL assisted SimMold 2010

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Mar 08, 2010

Simtech releases SimMold 2010, an advanced GUI which uses OpenGL for post-processing mold flow results.