OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 announced

Technology consortium Khronos has announced revisions 3.3 and 4.0 of OpenGL at GDC. Both versions offer roughly the same capabilities, but version 4 requires a DirectX 11 compatible video card.

It is noteworthy that the latest version is not compatible with older hardware. When OpenGL 3 was introduced, developers chose not to make pre-planned major changes to preserve compatibility. However, there was criticism from many quarters that the previously promised fundamental changes had been weakened too far.

With version 4.0 Khronos hopes not to make that mistake again. The latest revision requires a DirectX 11 compatible video card and also includes some features that appeared earlier in the latest version of DirectX. For example, OpenGL 4.0 supports tesselation. This allows geometric details to be added to a model made up of few polygons. Furthermore, 64-bit double precision floating point shader calculations are supported and according to Khronos, the new version is generally faster.

With OpenGL 3.3, the developers have tried to add as many of the new features as possible to the old 3.x lineup. This version also works with DirectX 10.1 generation video cards.