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Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with Release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification

The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

New functionality in the OpenGL 4.2 specification includes:

• enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
• capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
• modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
• packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

"OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. "As with previous OpenGL releases NVIDIA is committed to ship productized implementations as rapidly as possible after specification release. In fact, NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs." (Note: for more information, please visit http://developer.nvidia.com/opengl).

"AMD plans to release our OpenGL 4.2 beta drivers with the publication of the OpenGL 4.2 specification," said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, AMD Software Development (NYSE: AMD). "AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences."

Learn about OpenGL 4.2 and Khronos APIs at SIGGRAPH 2011 BOF Meetings

Visit Khronos at booth #663 and Khronos Press & Educators Open House at booth #764 to see Khronos members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL^® ES, WebGL , WebCL , OpenCL , OpenMAX , OpenVG , OpenSL ES , StreamInput and COLLADA . All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

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Jonathan Hirshon, Principal
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