Khronos 發布 OpenGL 4.2 規格

離上一版 OpenGL 4.1 發表過了差不多一年，Khronos 在 SIGGRAPH 2011 上又發表了新的 OpenGL 4.2 的規格了！官方新聞請參考《Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification》。

其中，比較重要的更新包括了：

• 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.

詳細資料請參考「OpenGL® Registry」，文件列表：

• OpenGL 4.2 Core Profile Specification (updated August 8, 2011)
  • OpenGL 4.2 Core Profile Specification with changes marked (updated July 25, 2010)
• OpenGL 4.2 Compatibility Profile Specification (updated August 8, 2011)
  • OpenGL 4.2 Compatibility Profile Specification with changes marked (updated August 8, 2011)
• OpenGL Shading Language 4.20.6 Specification (updated August 7, 2011)
  • OpenGL Shading Language 4.20.6 Specification (updated August 7, 2011) with changes marked

另外，nVIDIA 也已經針對 GeForce 400（Fermi）以上的顯示卡，發表了支援 OpenGL 4.2 的新驅動程式了～有需要的人可以到 nVIDIA 的 Developer Zone 下載。