SIGGRAPH 2007: OpenGL ARB officially announces OpenGL 3

Thursday 09th August 2007, 09:09:00 PM, written by Rys

Formerly known as Longs Peak, the OpenGL Architecture Review Board officially announced OpenGL 3 at SIGGRAPH yesterday during the OpenGL Birds of a Feather session! Sweet!

"The OpenGL ARB officially announced OpenGL 3 on August 8th 2007 at the Siggraph Birds of a Feather (BOF) in San Diego, CA. OpenGL 3 is the official name for what has previously been called OpenGL Longs Peak. OpenGL 3 is a great increase in efficiency in an already excellent API. It provides a solid, consistent and well thought out basis for the future. OpenGL 3 is a true industry effort with broad support from all vendors in the ARB. The OpenGL 3 specification is on track to be finalized at the next face-to-face meeting of the OpenGL ARB, at the end of August. This means the specification can be publicly available as soon as the end of September, after the mandatory 30 day Khronos approval period has passed. Also presented today were the changes to the OpenGL Shading Language that will accompany OpenGL 3."

I might get shot by the OpenGL purists for saying this, but the Mount Evans refresh of OpenGL 3 has some obvious similarities to D3D10, with the introduction of geometry shading, an integer instruction set, uniform buffers, native support for nonlinear colour spaces and more. The update is expected in about 3-5 months time.

As far as the new effects framework goes, glFX will primarily support OpenGL 2.1, 3.0 and ES 2.0 targets, all via tight integration with COLLADA FX, with the Khronos Group (and particularly NVIDIA it seems) leading the glFX effort.

Mount Evans will require DirectX 10 supporting hardware, with Longs Peak targeting the SM3.0-supporting class of DX9 parts out there. There's a utility library to come that's a bit like GLU, and the entire OpenGL 3 process should calm down very soon so the ARB can finalise everything and look to shipping Mount Evans.

You can grab the presentations from yesterday at the Khronos Group website and we congratulate the ARB for finalising 3!

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Tagging

b3d ± opengl, 3, longs, peak, mount, evans


Latest Thread Comments (5 total)
Posted by Humus on Friday, 10-Aug-07 00:00:14 UTC
Image: http://www.humus.ca/temp/yayhog.jpg

Posted by K.I.L.E.R on Friday, 10-Aug-07 00:16:55 UTC
THANK YOU!!I had a heart attack when I saw your post.I've been waiting for this like you wouldn't believe. When are Linux drivers coming out?

Posted by Chris Lux on Friday, 10-Aug-07 07:44:34 UTC
Quoting K.I.L.E.R
I've been waiting for this like you wouldn't believe. When are Linux drivers coming out?
sadly the OpenGL 3 spec will not be released until the end of september. for the really interesting stuff like Long Peaks reloaded (what ever this is) and Mt. Evans we have to wait another 3 to 5 months.

in the BOF session slides there are only few new points, so i guess we have to wait for september and hope drivers are coming alongside with the spec ;)

Posted by HumbleGuy on Friday, 10-Aug-07 20:52:56 UTC
Quote
Get back to the bare metal
Remove layers of waxy build-up
Update to reflect hardware changes
This isn’t 1992
Enhance performance
Remove inherent overhead
Streamlined API
Simplify application development
Remove redundancy
Focused on efficient usage
Simplify driver development
For higher quality implementations
I love this! Finally some meaningful movement.

Posted by bobvodka on Monday, 13-Aug-07 15:23:40 UTC
Quoting Chris Lux
sadly the OpenGL 3 spec will not be released until the end of september. for the really interesting stuff like Long Peaks reloaded (what ever this is) and Mt. Evans we have to wait another 3 to 5 months.
Longs Peak was the code name for OpenGL3.0. Mt. Evans if basically an extension to GL3.0 which will expose features for DX10 class hardware, however there is going to be another DX9 targeted release before then to add a few features beyond GL3.0.

For the record, GL3.0 is pretty much a remake of the GL2.1 features but with a new API and old, outdated and 'slow' functionality removed.

So, by the end of the year we could well be at OpenGL3.2, depending on the naming scheme they choose to adopt.


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