Khronos releases OpenGL 3.2 spec
updated 03:45 pm EDT, Tue August 4, 2009
Khronos outs OpenGL 3.2
At the SIGGRAPH show that kicked off on Tuesday in New Orleans, the Khronos Group announced the release of its latest OpenGL graphics standard, OpenGL 3.2 (PDF). This update, the third major one in the last year, improves performance, quality, accelerated geometry processing and greater flexibility in dealing with 3D applications. Open GL 3.1 was released in March.
Performance when processing vertex arrays and fence sync objects is improved, with a decrease in idling time during downtime when resources between the CPU and GPU are shared. Improvements have also been made to pipeline programmability, which includes geometry shaders in the OpenGL core and matches a similar feature introduced in DirectX 10 for Windows. Direct texture sample processing by shaders is possible thanks to a boost in cube map quality and multisampling rendering.
When the new OpenGL 3.2 standard is adopted is up to individual hardware manufacturers. NVIDIA is already offering beta Windows drivers based on OpenGL 3.2 specifications; many video chipsets offered by AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA in the past two years should support the brunt of the new features.
