August 7, 2006

The Khronos Group Publicly Releases OpenGL 2.1 Specification

Boston - The Khronos Group has revealed that the OpenGL 2.1 Specification has been approved by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) and publicly released. Originally introduced in 1992, OpenGL is the industry's most widely used and supported cross-platform 3D and 2D graphics API.
OpenGL 2.1 adds backwards-compatible enhancements to OpenGL's programmable pipeline, including Pixel Buffer Objects for fast texture and pixel copies between frame buffer and buffer objects in GPU memory, texture images specified in standard sRGB color space for enhanced application color management flexibility, and other additions to increase the flexibility of shader programming, such as non-square matrix support, support for arrays as first-class objects, a fragment position query in shaders using Point Sprites and an invariant attribute for variables to enhance shader code reliability.
 
The OpenGL 2.1 specification may be downloaded at http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs.
 
Khronos also will ratify the OpenGL 2.1 specification and continue to drive the evolution of OpenGL and the ecosystem of OpenGL tools and developers, including continued support for www.opengl.org -- with enhanced industry participation and strong synergy with other Khronos standards.
 
Through a program sponsored by the OpenGL ARB, Graphic Remedy will offer a free one year license to its gDEBugger tool. The Graphic Remedy Academic program will run for one year, during which time any OpenGL developer who is able to confirm he or she is in academia will receive an Academic gDEBugger License from Graphic Remedy at no cost. This license will be valid for one year and will include all gDEBugger software updates as they became available.
 
Academic licensees may also optionally decide to purchase a support contract for the software at the reduced rates of $45 or $950 for an Academic institute for a full year. More information is available at http://academic.gremedy.com.
gDEBugger is an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler for graphics application developers. gDEBugger saves developer's debugging time and boosts application performance by tracing application activity on top of OpenGL to provide the needed information to find bugs and to optimize application rendering performance. 
 
OpenGL is the vendor-neutral, graphics standard that enables 3D graphics on multiple platforms, ranging from cell phones to supercomputers. The OpenGL graphics system specification allows developers to incorporate a set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions and offers a graphics pipeline that provides access to graphics hardware acceleration.
 
Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 3D and 2D graphics API. OpenGL is supported on all major computer platforms, including AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP.