OpenGL 4.0 announced

[Michael Betke]

Just stumpled upon a news which announced OpenGL 4.0

 

OpenGL 4.0 has been specifically designed to bring significant benefits to application developers, including:

 

* 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 for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility;

* drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention;

* shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;

* separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects;

* 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality;

* performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.

 

Link: http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos-unleashes-cutting-edge-cross-platform-graphics-acceleration-opengl4

 

Sounds nice. Do I need new hardware? What means it for coders? Or for Leadwerks?

[Canardia]

Yay, finally OpenGL is 64-bit! That alone should make it run 5 times faster than 32-bit OpenGL. Plus there will be no more shadow leaps in far distances, which were caused by the lack of high dynamic number range of 32-bit floats (accuracy + big numbers combined was impossible, it was always either or).

[franck22000]

By waiting openGL 4.0, is there any news for OpenGL 3.2 support in leadwerks ? Josh ?

[L B]

What means it for coders? Or for Leadwerks?

 

For OpenGL coders, see the OpenGL detailed version changes.

For Leadwerks coders, nothing.

For Leadwerks, probably nothing either, we're not even at OGL3 yet.

[Niosop]

It's about time. Khronos has until now pretty much dropped the ball and let the OpenGL spec languish. Hopefully Josh will jump straight to 3.3 so we can get the features that are supported by current hardware and it will be less of a jump to 4.0 when supported hardware arrives.

[Josh]

Yes, and we were there:

 

I was talking with some NVidia and Khronos guys last night, and told them I was really happy with how OpenGL 4.0 has come together. What a surprise that was! ATI says they will have drivers really soon. From the way they said it, I would guess maybe three weeks.