Improvements and optimizations ready for developers to support new specification

This has been a busy week for AMD at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, especially on the industry standards front. AMD announced a Bullet Physics OpenCL^® plugin for Autodesk’s Maya application, OPTIS unveiled its THEIA RT simulation software suite which offers uncompromised performance using OpenCL and we also announced the latest AMD APP software development kit – version  2.5.

Today we released a beta driver for the OpenGL^® 4.2 API specification just announced by the Khronos Group this week. The new AMD Catalyst™ Beta package for the OpenGL 4.2 API is available for download for use with the Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux operating systems.

So what does OpenGL 4.2 mean for developers? The new specification is described by its creators as containing features that both extend functionality, and enable increased application performance – while maintaining full backwards compatibility. New functionality for OpenGL 4.2 includes the following:

• Increased support for advanced techniques like single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency with the ability to enable shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. This can make it easier for developers to efficiently manage which objects are visible without requiring multiple rendering passes
• The ability to save cycles by capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result – this means that complex objects can be efficiently replicated and repositioned
• A new feature to allow modification of an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to download the texture to the GPU again, which can enable significant performance improvements
• A full set of shader language features, including support for packing 8- and 16-bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth.

This announcement of OpenGL 4.2 really demonstrates the momentum and progress being driven by the Khronos Group. AMD announced Windows and Linux platform support for the OpenGL 4.1 standard in January, which improved OpenCL interoperability and added a host of new shader and rendering features. This week’s announcement of OpenGL 4.2 marks the seventh update to the standard in just three years.

At the same time, these innovations maintain full backwards compatibility, which means that developers can start using these new features whenever they choose, while still getting the most out of existing AMD Graphics across multiple operating systems and platforms.

In closing, I suggest developers go try out the AMD Catalyst Beta Package for the OpenGL 4.2 API today. Please let us know your feedback and improved results you’re seeing, as we prepare for the general availability driver release in the future.

Download For Windows: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalystOpenGL42BetaWin.aspx

Download For Linux: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalystOpenGL42BetaLinux.aspx

Pierre Boudier is an AMD Fellow and key contributor to the OpenGL standard. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites and references to third party trademarks are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

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