Name: Anonymous 2009-03-25 6:45
http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos-releases-streamlined-opengl-3.1-specification/
“The rapid nine month development of OpenGL 3.1 demonstrates the schedule-driven approach to the standard that is enabling and inspiring cutting edge, cross-platform GPU functionality,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group at Khronos. “OpenGL 3.1 answers the requests from the developer community to streamline and modernize the OpenGL API. The OpenGL ARB will continue to leverage the unique evolutionary model introduced in OpenGL 3.0 to drive the ongoing revolution in OpenGL while ensuring backwards compatibility where it is needed.”
OpenGL 3.1 introduces a broad range of significant new features including:
* Texture Buffer Objects - a new texture type that holds a one-dimensional array of texels of a specified format, enabling extremely large arrays to be accessed by a shader, vital for a wide variety of GPU compute applications;
* Signed Normalized Textures – new integer texture formats that represent a value in the range [-1.0,1.0];
* Uniform Buffer Objects - enables rapid swapping of blocks of uniforms for flexible pipeline control, rapid updating of uniform values and sharing of uniform values across program objects;
* More samplers – now at least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders;
* Primitive Restart – to easily restart an executing primitive, useful for efficiently drawing a mesh with many triangle strips, for example;
* Instancing - the ability to draw objects multiple times by re-using vertex data to reduce duplicated data and number of API calls;
* CopyBuffer API – accelerated copies from one buffer object to another, useful for many applications including those that share buffers with OpenCL™ 1.0 for advanced visual computing applications.
“The rapid nine month development of OpenGL 3.1 demonstrates the schedule-driven approach to the standard that is enabling and inspiring cutting edge, cross-platform GPU functionality,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group at Khronos. “OpenGL 3.1 answers the requests from the developer community to streamline and modernize the OpenGL API. The OpenGL ARB will continue to leverage the unique evolutionary model introduced in OpenGL 3.0 to drive the ongoing revolution in OpenGL while ensuring backwards compatibility where it is needed.”
OpenGL 3.1 introduces a broad range of significant new features including:
* Texture Buffer Objects - a new texture type that holds a one-dimensional array of texels of a specified format, enabling extremely large arrays to be accessed by a shader, vital for a wide variety of GPU compute applications;
* Signed Normalized Textures – new integer texture formats that represent a value in the range [-1.0,1.0];
* Uniform Buffer Objects - enables rapid swapping of blocks of uniforms for flexible pipeline control, rapid updating of uniform values and sharing of uniform values across program objects;
* More samplers – now at least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders;
* Primitive Restart – to easily restart an executing primitive, useful for efficiently drawing a mesh with many triangle strips, for example;
* Instancing - the ability to draw objects multiple times by re-using vertex data to reduce duplicated data and number of API calls;
* CopyBuffer API – accelerated copies from one buffer object to another, useful for many applications including those that share buffers with OpenCL™ 1.0 for advanced visual computing applications.