Kronos Open GL ES 3.1 release
March 2014 – At GDC 2014 in San Francisco the Kronos Group held a briefing on their the releases for the graphics software industry. The highlight was the announcement of the official release of the Open GL ES 3.1 extensions which has been anticipated by multiple software suppliers and developers.
The highlights of the release include features that in existing silicon that has been released, but were not incorporated in the 3.0 release. These include new shader and draw indirect (including api to physics sim definitions). The draw indirect commands allow for rendering object in a buffer rather just a new object load render. The other key points include the desktop oriented Open GL 4.4 will support the full specification of Open GL ES 3.1 and that there is now a more efficient way for mult-CPU and multi-GPU systems to talk directly to memory without the need for an API.
They also rolled out EGL 1.5. This is a cross window and cross OS porting kit and deployment solution. It not only allows for multiple OSs and Windows to connect & share data from a single data set, but also scale out to multiple OSs.
The release date also held updates to OpenCL on the heterogeneous compute side for joint CPU/GPU/DSP/HW solutions include a new platform and runtime APIs. OpenCL 2.0 is stull on track for a 2014 release. Updates were also shown for WebCL with a new Javascript builder and SYCL for OpenCL which is a new C + + programming y that sits on top of OpenCL.
