OpenGL 4.0 Spec Gets Boost with ATI Preview Drivers

From DailyTech: DirectX 11 has been gathering a lot of support, especially over the last six months as ATI has released an entire top-to-bottom lineup with support for the standard. Although DirectX is probably the best known collection of Application Programming Interfaces for games, OpenGL still remains relevant as a competitor in driving gaming technology forward.

OpenGL is managed by the Khronos Group, and it recently released the OpenGL 4.0 specification. The twelfth revision to the original spec adds many new features, some of which is also supported by current hardware through the new OpenGL 3.3 spec.

OpenGL 3.3 adds support for OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) 3.3, which includes built-in functions for getting and setting the bit encoding for floating-point values. There are also new color blending functions and performance enhancements.

The real meat is in OpenGL 4.0, adding support for GLSL 4.0 and the fragment shader texture functions it allows. Per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions will allow for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility. The shader subroutines have been redesigned for significantly increased programming flexibility.

New tessellation stages and two new corresponding shader types are introduced. Tessellation control and tessellation evaluation shaders operate on "patches" (fixed-sized collections of vertices). Tessellation can increase visual quality significantly by taking a rough object and generating new vertices to smooth out the object and provide more detail without excessive performance penalties. These two new shader stages will enable the offloading of geometry tessellation from the CPU to the GPU.

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