OpenGL 4.0 Specs & Features Revealed at GDC 2010

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What is OpenGL and why do I need it you ask? Well in case you happen to just love all the 3D games you’re able to play on your computers and on your smartphones too then you also happen to love OpenGL, without even knowing about it.

And since the Game Developers Conference 2010 is in full swing in San Francisco, the Khronos Group decided it was time to announce the official OpenGL specifications today.

The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been developed by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) and “it includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language”. What that means for you and me is that developers will be able to offer us better graphics, graphics acceleration and overall better performance in our future favorite games so in theory it’s all good news so far. But here’s what you can really expect from OpenGL 4.0 in terms of specs and features:

• two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU;
• per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility;
• drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention;
• shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;
• separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects;
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality;
• performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.

Sure that sounds just a little too complicated but what’s the real important conclusion here is that OpenGL 4.0 is going to be the competitor we wanted for Microsoft’s DirectX 11. The new Open GL standard will be fully supported by NVIDIA’s upcoming Fermi-based graphics accelerators which definitely comes right in the nick of time.

Even more importantly the new OpenGL 4.0 standard will be an important factor that will be “driving innovation into OpenGL ES and WebGL” which means our future smartphones will get even better 3D graphics and we will enjoy even better games while on the go.