OpenGL 3.1 :The Final Specifications Are available

The Khronos Group has announced the availability of OpenGL 3.1, the new version of this library of well-known players. Although loss of speed due to the growth of Microsoft's Direct3D, this industry standard continues to evolve. After version 3.0 often deemed "disappointing", the developers accelerate the pace of output and publish a version that should meet expectations.

OpenGL 3.1 is not radically different from version 3.0, since the latter has just introduced an evolutionary model. We therefore speak increment, the purpose of milling is roughly 3.1 to make it much easier to use this library by third party developers.

OpenGL 3.1 includes version 1.4 of GLSL shading language and various novelties such as:

• CopyBuffer: an API allowing accelerated copy of an object to another buffer
• Instantiation: ability to draw an object several times by reusing the vertex data, which reduces the multiplication of data and calls to APIs
• Opportunity to simply restart a primitive implementation
• We note the appearance of certain improvements which affect not only the 3D developers. It is important to remember that the library is already available OpenCL. Remember, it can be calculated by the graphics card operations which should normally be assigned to the central processor. This shift from the CPU to the GPU is found in Snow Leopard, the next Mac OS X.

Of course, NVIDIA and AMD have announced that they will support OpenGL 3.1.

Hello , Read the Official Press Release Here
The Khronos Group announced today it has publicly released the OpenGL 3.1 specification that modernizes and streamlines the cross-platform, royalty-free API for 3D graphics. OpenGL 3.1 includes GLSL 1.40, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides enhanced access to the latest generation of programmable graphics hardware through improved programmability, more efficient vertex processing, expanded texturing functionality and increased buffer management flexibility. OpenGL 3.1 implementations are expected shortly from multiple vendors.

OpenGL 3.1 leverages the evolutionary model introduced in OpenGL 3.0 to dramatically streamline the API for simpler and more efficient software development, and accelerates the ongoing convergence with the widely available OpenGL ES mobile and embedded 3D API to unify application development. The OpenGL 3.1 specification enables developers to leverage state-of-the-art graphics hardware available on a significant number of installed GPUs across all desktop operating systems. According to Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics market analyst in California, the installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.1 exceeds 100 million units. OpenGL 3.0 drivers are already shipping on AMD, NVIDIA and S3 GPUs.

Concurrently with the release of the OpenGL 3.1 specification, the OpenGL ARB has released an optional compatibility extension that enables application developers to access the OpenGL 1.X/2.X functionality removed in OpenGL 3.1, ensuring full backwards compatibility for applications that require it.

“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.

Member Quotes
“AMD will support OpenGL 3.1 in the upcoming driver release for the Radeon and FirePro products, and is fully supportive of the OpenGL API,” said Suki Samra, director of OpenGL at AMD.

“NVIDIA is committed to the rapid adoption of OpenGL 3.1 and we are proud to release our beta drivers on the same day as the specification itself,” said Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. “OpenGL 3.1 marks over 15 years of tradition in advancing the state-of-the-art for graphics developers.”

Hello , It is certainly for this kind of "basic" functionality was absent that version 3.0 was judged as disappointing. I never dev OpenGL 3.0 for my part, I will try to turn my attention to this new version. For my part I much prefer to use D3D openGL that I find far more user-friendly, and I find it unfortunate that the workplace tends to abandon openGL. Hopefully the 3.1 re-tilt the balance in his favor.

Design a game using OpenGL, it would be the best way to facillities portability Linux? (This seems to be the last major obstacle to the development of market shares among individuals penguin, eh?) If so, you can trust microsoft to try to lobby against the mass adoption of open-gl by the gam

It is obvious that a society that chooses DirectX has access to more than just 3D. To another platform, contact with another set of APIs. The choice of OpenGL does not do everything, because it is the sound input / output, etc..
Blizzard is a very large box, which can afford the luxury of waiting for the release of its games that everything is ready. Their titles are always simultaneously in both PC / Mac, in fact the two versions are in the same box.