OpenGL 4.0 released

opengl.org

74 points·oscardelben··7 comments

To sum it up here :

Most important : "[...] it looks like the most notable change is the addition of "Tessellation Control Processor" and "Tessellation Evaluation Processor"."

aand

"Most of the improvements in GL 4.0 are incremental. Apart from the obvious inclusion of tessellation support (which is perhaps the most important DX 11 feature), it includes:

- Transform Feedback Objects

- Sampler Objects

- Cube Map Texture Arrays

- Block Sampling (textureGather)

- Multisample support in fragment shaders"

To clarify: these quotes are coming from several authors in omnigoat's link below and not from the actual article.

Interesting to see this rolled out at GDC instead of SIGGRAPH. Perhaps Khronos is trying to take on Direct3D more directly?

I remember people being disappointed to OpenGL 3.0 not being large enough change. Is OpenGL 4.0 now that change that was missing from OpenGL 3.0?

No, the people who were disappointed by GL3 mostly wanted the early ideas of an object model to replace the bind-and-set model that OpenGL has been using. GL3 did introduce some extensions for direct state access (DSA), which is a decent compromise, but it wasn't in the core spec. It's still not in the core GL4 spec, but on the message boards it's starting to sound like GL5 may have DSA in the core. GL4 does add a ton of good new functionality, but not the huge change to the programming model that DSA will offer.

Could someone summarize what this means (in lay terms) when compared to the latest generation of DirectX?

Honestly, the most intelligent discussion of OpenGL, I find, invariably comes from GameDev.net:

More specifically, watch this thread: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=5...

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