OpenGL 3.0

[Chris61182]

It’s finally here!!!

Press Release:
http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos_releases_opengl_30_specifications_to_support_latest_generations_of/

New Spec’s PDF:

glspec30.pdf

New Shader Language PDF:

GLSLangSpec.1.30.pdf

[Chris61182]

All in all, not as ground breaking as they had lead us to believe but a worthwhile and necessary update.

The biggest problem I can see is that they didn’t immediately deprecate the features they decided upon. Instead by extending their life it’ll only make the process of finally removing them that much more painful.

[lhkbob]

I had an OGLASM. Can’t read it yet because I’m work, but I’m excited.

[Chris61182]

@lhkbob

I had an OGLASM. Can’t read it yet because I’m work, but I’m excited.

Not to make you jealous but it was my job to read the new specs this morning ;D.

[lhkbob]

I’ve read through it and I agree that it’s not as radical as it could be. I think the coolest features are a new glsl language, more texture formats, and core framebuffer objects. I’m skeptical at how useful vertex array objects can be since they seem like more flexible interleaved arrays. My main problem with them is that you can only use one tex coord array (unless I missed a detail). Hopefully they’ll be fast, though.

[bienator]

nvidia released GL3 beta windows drivers:

OpenGL Driver Support

[Riven]

From the press release

The OpenGL working group has also released a set of extensions to OpenGL 3.0 that can be immediately used by developers and, after industry feedback, will potentially be included in the next generation of OpenGL targeted for release in less than 12 months. These extensions include geometry shaders, further instancing support, and texture buffer objects.

sigh

[bienator]

maybe a bit earlier:

OpenGL 3.1 promise follows gamer revolt

[quote]Trevett also personally hopes OpenGL 3.1 can be delivered in six months’ time, as opposed to the two years it took to craft 3.0, which was released on Monday.
[/quote]
somewhat related (AMD drivers):

Khronos Forums

[quote]A representative from AMD indicated that they are targeting Q1 2009 for a complete 3.0 release, with some number of betas expected between now and then. It was also pointed out that they are planning to implement the GL3 extension pack (geom shader, texbo, instancing).
[/quote]

[Orangy_Tang]

Key words being “hopes”, “targetting” and “planning” - all weasel words that imply they’re going to do something without actually making a firm commitment to do anything at all.

I’m still baffled that they made a major decision to drop the new object model (which was what everyone was excited over) back in january yet completely failed to announce this to developers until now.