Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.2 Specification

jrepin tips news that the Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.2 specification. Some of the new functionality 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 Has Left DirectX In The Dust

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what delusion planet you are posting from but here in the Real World OpenGL has left DirectX in the dust in both features and performance a long time ago.

Khronos is absolutely on fire with giving developers what they want as quickly as possible. OpenGL developers have access to the absolute bleeding edge features of new graphics cards that people who are stuck still using DirectX have to wait around for Microsoft to get off their ass and implement.

It shouldn't be surprising OpenGL has won the API war with Microsoft:

210 Million OpenGL ES based Android devices a year.

150 Million OpenGL ES based iOS devices a year.

Every Linux, Mac,and Windows machine

The dying PC games market and the last place Xbox 360 are the only places left in the world still using the dead end DirectX API.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[TheRaven64]

OpenGL promised in the last version to cut away a lot of the features from really old versions, just like DirectX 10 did. This would have the disadvantage of breaking compatibility but the advantage of making it easier to support into the future and more efficient right now. Instead they maintained backward compatibility which made it bloated and hard to use.

You are aware that the complaints that you are repeating were about OpenGL 3.0, were addressed in 3.1, and the current topic is 4.2? 3.0 introduced a deprecation mechanism, and deprecated a load of stuff. 3.1 removed it. In 4, all of the fixed-function stuff is gone completely.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[arth1]

You know that is one of the things MSFT really should be given credit for, because DirectX "just works".

Is that why so many games using DirectX come bundled with all those DirectX updates and patches?

Checking a randomly chosen game I have installed here (Dragon Age Origins) shows no less than 74(!) cab files with DirectX updates and patches, from Feb2005_d3dx9_24_x86.cab to NOV2007_d3dx9_36.x86.cab

Yep, it "just works".