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OpenGL 4.1
Friday, July 30, 2010 | Permalink

I'm a few days late on this news, but earlier this week OpenGL 4.1 was released. There was a time when I had doubts in the future of OpenGL, but in the last couple of years the API has really made a lot of progress, so much so that I sometimes feel I can't keep up with it. I would say that by now it's back to where it used to be, namely a competent alternative to DirectX that's also cross-platform. Some feature missing perhaps, but at least as often there are bonus features not available in DirectX.

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Aras Pranckevicius
Friday, July 30, 2010

Too bad some platforms (I'm looking at you, OS X) are still stuck with GL 2.1

But yeah, after GL3.0 fiasco I was pleasantly surprised by the further releases. Quickly executed steps in the right direction. Still no core re-architecting of sometimes ancient concepts, but at least a feature parity with D3D

fmoreira
Friday, July 30, 2010

and it finally supports offline shader compilation

http://www.geeks3d.com/20100727/opengl-4-1-allows-the-use-of-binary-shaders/

Axel
Saturday, July 31, 2010

Apparently you can only precompile for *a specific* driver. There is still no standard bytecode.

Overlord
Sunday, August 1, 2010

While off-line shader compilation is nice i but i feel that extensions like EXT_shader_image_load_store and ARB_viewport_array is much more interesting and i would like to experiment some with them, if only i had a Fermi card.

Jon Watte
Thursday, September 9, 2010

But are there actually working drivers for any large-scale Mac hardware where support comes anywhere close to GL 4.1? I'm assuming MacOS X is the main GL platform for consumer software.

Even on desktop Linux, it's questionable, but it's really hard to make a business out of selling consumer software on Linux anyway.

Micke
Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Now, someone can perhaps make a dx10++ wrapper for those still on XP *cough* ? ... Seriously though, I'd say the problem isn't the features, nor DirectX or OpenGL. But rather the fact that most sold computers today are laptops. Since most laptops use Intel chips you all know what that means, right?