The OpenGL Pipeline Newsletter Volume 001
Q3 2006
Table of Contents - All Volumes
A Message from the ARB Secretary
Welcome to the first issue of OpenGL Pipeline, the official newsletter of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board. Welcome -- and goodbye -- because this will probably be the last issue! Now that I have your attention: this doesn't mean that the newsletter is going away. But the ARB itself is going away! Why? Where? How? What does this mean for OpenGL standardization? Read on →
A Welcome Message from the Ecosystem Working Group
Welcome to the first edition of OpenGL Pipeline, the quarterly newsletter covering all things the OpenGL standards body has "in the pipeline." Each issue will feature status updates from the various active working groups, along with a handful of thoughtful articles, event announcements, and product spotlights. Then if there's any room leftover, we'll throw in a semi-informative rambling or two. All we can promise is that this publication will be worth every penny you've paid for it. Read on →
Free OpenGL Debug Tools for Academic Users
Here is some great news for students and academic OpenGL users! The OpenGL ARB and Graphic Remedy have crafted an Academic Program to make the full featured gDEBugger OpenGL debug toolkit available for use in your daily work and research -- free of charge! gDEBugger is a powerful OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler delivering one of the most intuitive OpenGL development toolkits to help you save precious debugging time and boost your application's performance. Read on →
Superbuffers Working Group Update
As you might have heard, the scope of the Superbuffers Working Group has broadened considerably. After we finished the EXT_framebuffer_object extension, which you all know and love (I hope!), we started working on adding some missing functionality. Some of you expressed interest in features like rendering to one and two component render targets, as well as being able to mix attachments of different dimensions and even different formats. But most importantly, you wanted to be able to find out how to set up a framebuffer object that is guaranteed to be supported by the OpenGL implementation your application is running on. Read on →
New Texture Functions with Awkward Names to Avoid Ugly Artifacts
One problem with many of the extension specs that we face is that they are too often short on motivating examples. Even when there are examples, they suffer from dreaded ASCII art. With this newsletter, I can not only put in a few more examples, I can replace the dreaded ASCII art with the less dreaded programmer art. Read on →
Improved synchronization across GPUs and CPUs - No more glFinish!
The Async Working Group recently finished the ARB_sync specification. It provides a synchronization model that enables a CPU to synchronize with a GPU OpenGL command stream across multiple OpenGL contexts and multiple CPU threads. This extension, for example, allows you to find out if OpenGL has finished processing a GL command without calling glFinish. Read on →