Khronos Group Releases OpenGL 4.5 and Begins Low-Level API Development

The Khronos Group has released OpenGL 4.5 with some optimizations. The organization has also announced that it is working on a ‘low-level api’ to compete with AMD’s Mantle and Direct3D 12. The gpgpu language Spir 2.0 has also been released.

Earlier OpenGL specifications can make it cumbersome for developers to work with objects, such as textures. For example, several steps are needed to generate, describe and manipulate a texture. With the advent of direct state access in the official OpenGL 4.5 specification, the state of an object can be directly queried and manipulated, simplifying code writing. With this, OpenGL is catching up, because Direct3D, for example, has been supporting such operations for some time.

OpenGL 4.5 also promises developers better options for controlling how instructions are sent to the hardware. Multi-threaded code should be able to take advantage of this in particular. In addition, OpenGL 4.5 offers a better layer of security, something that WebGL code in particular can benefit from, and there is compatibility with the OpenGL ES 3.1 API.

The Khronos Group also announced the Spir 2.0 specification, a programming language for gpgpu applications. This alternative to OpenCL no longer requires code very similar to C, but Spir 2.0 should allow developers to write code in other programming languages, such as Python or javascript. The code is then converted into Spir code by the compiler for this programming language, after which the OpenCL runtime processes it.

The organization has also indicated that it plans to introduce a low-level cross-platform API in response to the arrival of AMD’s Mantle, Apple’s Metal and Microsoft’s upcoming Direct3D 12 standard. The Khronos Group established the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative to develop this api.

With the still unnamed api, developers should get more control over the gpu, which should improve the performance compared to, for example, OpenGL. In addition, the Khronos Group has the ambition to make the low-level api suitable for both mobile and desktop platforms, eliminating the need for derivatives such as OpenGL ES. In time, the successor to OpenGL should develop into a widely supported and completely open API for 3D applications and games.