OpenGL Headline News
Instance culling using geometry shaders by Daniel Rákos
Category: Developers • Comments • Permalink
Feb 09, 2010
Since the appearance of Shader Model 4.0 people wonder how to take advantage of the newly introduced programmable pipeline stage. The most important feature enabled by geometry shaders is that one can change the amount of emitted primitives inside the pipeline. The first thing that a naive developer would try to do with it is geometry tesselation. However, the new shader performs very bad when used for tesselation in a real life scenario even though there are demos show casting this possibility. If we take a closer look at the new feature we observe that the most revolutionary in it is not that it can raise the number of emitted primitives but that it can discard them. This article would like to present a rendering technique that takes advantage of this aspect of geometry shaders to enable the GPU accelerated culling of higher order primitives. Also it features an OpenGL 3.2 demo for showing the technique in practice.
OpenCSG 1.3.0 image-based CSG renderer with better support for MDI applications
Category: Applications • Comments • Permalink
Feb 08, 2010
OpenCSG is an OpenGL API-based library for doing image-space rendering of shapes made up by constructive solid geometry (CSG). The new release 1.3.0 implements support for applications with a multiple document interface and use OpenCSG in different OpenGL windows.
The Cafu Engine using OpenGL is now open source
Category: Applications • Comments • Permalink
Feb 08, 2010
The Cafu Engine (formerly Ca3D-Engine) is now available to everyone as free software under the GNU General Public License! The source code as well as precompiled binaries are available at our Downloads page, and the new Developers page explains how to get started with the source code quickly. In addition to the compressed archives, the source code is also available directly from the Subversion repository. Learn more
ATI Radeon HD 5450 provides OpenGL 3.2 graphics
Category: Processors • Comments • Permalink
Feb 04, 2010
AMD launched its least expensive video chipset capable of OpenGL 3.2 and DirectX 11 graphics. The ATI Radeon HD 5450 has all the same visual effects as the 5600 and 5800 lines but is trimmed down to 80 stream processors, 8 texture units and a 650MHz engine clock speed. The design allows for extremely quiet cards: it can either use a low-speed fan in a single slot or a completely fanless design in a slightly larger space.
Irrlicht Engine 1.7 using OpenGL has been released
Category: Developers • Comments • Permalink
Feb 03, 2010
Irrlicht version 1.7 has been released. New rendering features are: Multiple Render Target (MRT), geometry shaders (OpenGL only), possibility to access texture mipmaps and to provide custom mipmaps, separate TextureWrap modes for U and V coordinates and the option to mirror wrap. Enhanced options for 2D drawing like thickness, anti-aliasing and filtering. We added a new VertexManipulator interface for simple creation of vertex manipulation algorithms. Zipfiles now support Bzip2 and LZMA compression and AES encryption. Enabled VBO Support for skydomes and other standard meshes. Ogre .mesh format skeletal animations now supported, and Ogre 32bit index meshes as well. NPK (Nebula device archive) support added. Support for external windows under OS X. And of course lots of other improvements and bug fixes.
Tech Soup OpenGL 3 Training announced
Category: Developers • Comments • Permalink
Feb 03, 2010
TechSoup has announced a new OpenGL 3 training course in Los Angeles from March 30 to April 2. Regardless of if you’re new to graphics, new to OpenGL, or just looking to uncover the latest techniques that OpenGL will allow, this is your course.
FurMark 1.8.0 OpenGL Stress Test Available
Category: Developers • Comments • Permalink
Feb 03, 2010
The new version of FurMark, the popular graphics card stress test for overclockers, is available. FurMark is an OpenGL 2 stress test and benchmark for Windows and uses fur rendering to overheat the graphics card. This new version adds a new effect based on vertex displacement mapping as well as an increased rendering workload.
