OpenGL 3

[tech2000]

The OpenGL ARB officially announced OpenGL 3 on August 8th 2007 at the Siggraph Birds of a Feather (BOF) in San Diego, CA. OpenGL 3 is the official name for what has previously been called OpenGL Longs Peak. OpenGL 3 is a great increase in efficiency in an already excellent API. It provides a solid, consistent and well thought out basis for the future. OpenGL 3 is a true industry effort with broad support from all vendors in the ARB. The OpenGL 3 specification is on track to be finalized at the next face-to-face meeting of the OpenGL ARB, at the end of August. This means the specification can be publicly available as soon as the end of September, after the mandatory 30 day Khronos approval period has passed. Also presented today were the changes to the OpenGL Shading Language that will accompany OpenGL 3.

http://www.opengl.org/

Cheers, Anders

[tech2000]

http://www.khronos.org/library/detail/s ... sentation/

http://www.khronos.org/developers/libra ... erview.pdf

[dirkpitt]

The BOF notes aren't terribly detailed, but other stuff that's known are:

- OGL3 is backward compatible with OGL2.x, extensions etc can still be used as usual
- Special OGL3-only features like OGL3 GLSL, reference counted objects, templates, new objects types like filter objects will probably require a OGL3-only context (but can draw to same view as OGL2 context)
- Procedural rendering with glVertex(), glBegin/End(), fixed-function transform and lighting eliminated (driver was supposedly always "emulating" fixed-function via vertex program)
- In short, many of these changes bring OpenGL update to date with similar features in Microsoft's DirectX 10.

Some background on these changes: A peek inside OpenGL Longs Peak (OpenGL 3) PDF

[LordFerret]

In short, many of these changes bring OpenGL update to date with similar features in Microsoft's DirectX 10.