Buffer storage is directly targeted at APUs, SoCs, and other GPU/CPU integrated devices where the two processors share memory pools, address space, and other resources. The biggest feature hitting the OpenGL core specification in 4.4 is buffer storage (ARB_buffer_storage). Most of these are admittedly so low level that it would be difficult for anyone but developers to appreciate, but there are a few items we wanted to go over for their importance and for wider reflection of the state of OpenGL. This year Khronos isn’t making such sweeping changes to OpenGL, but they are adding several new low-level features that should catch the eyes of developers. OpenGL 4.4 follows up on OpenGL 4.3, which last year broke significant ground for OpenGL by introducing compute shaders, ASTC texture compression, and other new functionality for the API. This being the 5 th edition of OpenGL 4.x, Khronos has continued iterating on OpenGL in concert with their pipelined development process. Khronos’s first announcement for SIGGRAPH 2013 is that the OpenGL 4.4 specification has been ratified and released.

Khronos membership in turn is a who’s who of technology, and includes virtually every major GPU vendor, both desktop and mobile.

The Khronos Group is of course the industry consortium responsible for OpenGL, OpenCL, WebGL, and other open graphics/multimedia standards and APIs, so their announcements carry a great deal of importance for the industry. Most years the first major announcement to hit the wire comes from the Khronos Group, and this year is no different. As a result SIGGRAPH offers something for everyone in the graphics/GPU trident, gaming, compute, and professional rendering alike. And though it isn’t really a gaming conference – this is a show dedicated to professional software and hardware – a number of those announcements do end up being gaming related, if only tangentially. Outside of the individual vendor events and individual technologies we cover throughout the year, SIGGRAPH is typically the major venue for new technology and standards announcements. Kicking off this week is the annual SIGGRAPH conference, the graphics industry’s yearly professional event.

Opengl 4.4