Khronos Group is the non-profit organization which sets standards for open source, media rendering API’s, including OpenGL. This basically competes against Microsoft and it’s Direct3D technology. Direct3D 11, the latest version, offers greater functionality than the older OpenGL desktop and mobile versions. With ES 3.0(mobile) and 4.3(desktop), OpenGL is finally catching up to, and in some areas, passing Direct3D. One upgrade is to the compression tchnology, which has gotten much better. This is more important for mobile devices, since it uses less power, and can do more rendering with less hardware. Also, the ability to move applications between the desktop and mobile versions has been made easier, allowing the porting of a game to be done quickly(and cheaply). The following is the press release from Khronos related to ES 3.0
The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® ES 3.0 specification, bringing significant functionality and portability enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is used on the majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets. OpenGL ES 3.0 provides access to state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality with portability across diverse mobile and embedded operating systems and platforms. OpenGL ES 3.0 is backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0, enabling applications to incrementally add new visual features to applications. The full specification and reference materials are available for immediate download at http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/.
“OpenGL ES 3.0 draws on proven functionality from OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2 and carefully balances the introduction of leading-edge technology with addressing the real-world needs of developers,” said Tom Olson, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and director of graphics research at ARM.
New functionality in the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification includes:
* multiple enhancements to the rendering pipeline to enable acceleration of advanced visual effects including: occlusion queries, transform feedback, instanced rendering and support for four or more rendering targets;
* high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
* a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations;
* greatly enhanced texturing functionality including guaranteed support for floating point textures, 3D textures, depth textures, vertex textures, NPOT textures, R/RG textures, immutable textures, 2D array textures, swizzles, LOD and mip level clamps, seamless cube maps and sampler objects;
* an extensive set of required, explicitly sized texture and render-buffer formats, reducing implementation variability and making it much easier to write portable applications.
The OpenGL ES working group at Khronos expects to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide extensive conformance tests for OpenGL ES 3.0 within six months, enabling implementers of the specification to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure. This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.