Why are they bothering to spend the man-hours to hammer out all that language for 3.x, if thereās no intent to ever have it actually work on 3.x? I have trouble believing that people are putting in the paid hours ājust for kicks,ā that there was never any intention at any point in industry history to actually do it.
I have trouble believing that the effort in writing the extension against GL 4.x would be any different from writing it against 3.x. The only āverbiageā that would change would be removing many entries in the āDependencies onā section. And thatās hardly where the spec spends most of its āverbiageā.
Simply put: no greater effort was spent writing this spec against 3.x. Itās just not that important, compared to the actual meat of the text.
I have trouble with your thesis that only 4.x HW would do this and anything else is a complete waste of time.
You can believe me or not; that wonāt change the fact that you wonāt see one iota of hardware that could image load/store that canāt also support GL 4.x.
Well, you might in the mobile space. But even then, youād be looking at some new extension written against OpenGL ES 3.0, not this one exactly.
Hereās a theory: this work started when 3.x was going to be one thing, but it turned into something else, sliding features into the 4.x era, but they didnāt re-verbalize the extension work in progressā¦
Or alternatively, the ARB doesnāt care what version something is written against. Again, extension specifications should never be seen as a guide to what versions of OpenGL will ever implement that extension. At best, itās only a guide to what versions could.
Uniform_buffer_object is written against OpenGL 2.1, even though no such hardware can support it. ARB_blend_func_extended is written against 3.2, but only claims that OpenGL 1.0 and ARB_fragment_shader are required.
Youāre just misinterpreting the information in the spec, assuming that it has anything to do with what actual hardware will support it.