OpenGL 3.0 spec ... alive!

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi all,

I just wanted to share the "phew!" :)

ARB announced OpenGL 3.0 today, after year lasting postponement due to "making it better".

Announcement (http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos_releases_opengl_30_specifications_to_support_latest_generations_of/)
OpenGL Specification (http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/glspec30.20080811.pdf)

It is very happy moment for me, as I was starting to be a bit nervous whether my prediction about OGL 3 in 2008 will come true.

OpenGL 3 brings new features, and approach providing mechanism for supporting legacy apps ( OpenGL 1.1 - 2.1 ) as well as new revisions ( 3.0+ ), allowing optimize drivers better.

That means - TBGL module will work as till now, with no compatibility issues of any kind. This is one of the reasons I chose OpenGL API over ... its competitors.

I will post more on this topic soon, just need to let my head cool down now :).
There has been lot of emotions about this release, I am sure you will notice many people swearing at loud using not very nice vocabulary as well, some even hysterical :D

It seems it will take some period of time ( Siggraph will tell more ) to see headers and details supported hardware, main OpenGL website still references to 2.1 on most places.

To summarize, keypoints for now:

"Smart" backward compatibility
Supported hardware "2 years old cards"
Matching latest hardware additions
AMD, Intel( :o ) and NVIDIA announced their intent to provide full implementations
Waiting for next specification update should not take that long ( 12 months )
Enhanced GLSL


It seems to me that jumping directly to 3.0 seems a bit rash when I look at added features ( it is more cleanup ), but some design decisions prepair new ground for things to come.

Will talk more about it in following weeks, I am waiting for Siggraph presentations now :),
Petr

[matthew]

It's good news but I personally don't trust companies like Intel when they say they'll provide a 'full implementation'. :P

The SiS graphics card in my old laptop from 2006 implements OpenGL much better than the Intel card in my Vista laptop which I brought recently.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Matthew,

I know :D I have Intel at home and while for OpenGL 1.1 it is quite ok, going higher is usually dangerous. It seems they picked few features they like and rest kind of ignore :).

We will see ... Intel has that Larabee technology in works, maybe implementing it on this architecture will be more successfull.

I have read the specification now, it is not ... that long list of additions :-\, it seems they dropped promised "object model" from feature list. Not such a big loss for me, but as it was one of the planned additions I remembered because lot of talk around, it surprises me.
The biggest change seems to be GLSL 1.3, and the different creation of OpenGL 1.1-2.1, and 3.0+ contexts and related changes.

The list of deprecated functionalities in 3.0+ is quite huge, good there is that compatibility layer for old apps, and now it is clear which features avoid for writing "next gen" OpenGL application.

Hope more materials demonstrating use of some techniques will come soon, Siggraph BOF starts on this Wednesday!


Petr