The Khronos Group open standards industry consortium issued its OpenGL 4.1 specification, promising enhanced graphics functionality and full compatibility with the OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for more efficient porting between the desktop and mobile platforms. The sixth update to the royalty-free OpenGL 2D and 3D graphics specification in the last two years, OpenGL 4.1 maintains full backwards compatibility, enabling developers to begin using new features while accessing cutting-edge GPU functionality across a number of operating systems and platforms. Upgrades in 4.1 include querying and loading a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time; binding programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility; 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for improved geometric precision; and multiple viewports for a rendering surface for enhanced rendering flexibility.
OpenGL 4.1 also features new ARB extensions like OpenGL sync objects linked to OpenCL event objects for enhanced OpenCL interoperability, the capability to set stencil values in a fragment shader for improved rendering flexibility and callback mechanisms to receive enhanced errors and warning messages. Khronos Group also introduced a set of ARB extensions to enable maximum OpenGL 4.1 core functionality across previous generation GPU hardware, touting greater flexibility and platform coverage for application developers.
The full OpenGL 4.1 specification is available for download here.
For more on OpenGL 4.1:
- read this release