OpenGL 3.0 - A Big Step in the Right Direction

There has been much controversy over the direction the Khronos Group/OpenGL ARB has chosen for the next major version of OpenGL. After testing an approach that would have a drastic effect on the API, requiring complete OpenGL application rewrites and not introducing any of the long awaited features modern GPUs are capable of, the choice was made to give programmers what they are really waiting for. And that’s new features now. GL 3.0 takes two important steps to moving open standard graphics forward in a major way. The first is to provide core and ARB extension access to the new and exciting capabilities of hardware. The second is to create a roadmap that allows developers to see what parts of core specifications will be going away in the future, also providing the OpenGL ARB with a way to introduce new features faster.

Over the last few years graphics hardware has made great strides forward. Different vendors have exposed home-grown extensions to give users access to hardware, but vendor extensions vary between vendors and are not a stable approach to supporting new hardware.  GL3.0 brings these new features under one roof, defining one common and accepted way that all vendors will implement. Now all GL application programmers can get access to things like float color/texture/depth buffers, integer formats, conditional rendering, framebuffer objects, transform feedback, vertex array objects, half-float data types (vertex/pixel), and so much more. With these new features all developers have the tools to add new eye candy and much better optimize render algorithms and performance.

Many of the new features of OpenGL3.0 provide mechanisms to increase the efficiency and speed of today’s complex scenes. Conditional rendering allows an app to discard geometry that would be occluded during normal rendering. Half float formats can help drastically compress vertex data sets. Vertex array objects make setting up rendering much easier and less error prone. Map buffer range support allows a small portion of a buffer to be mapped, even while it is rendered from, no more GPU stalls required. There are also quite few additions to enhance rendering flexibility. Framebuffer objects provide a fast and simple way to accomplish off-screen rendering.  Transform feedback opens the door to a whole new set of complex multi-pass rendering and geometry generation algorithms previously impossible. Integer-in-shader support allows for much more flexible and natural shader code. Several other important features such as instanced rendering and geometry shaders have now been given ARB extension status as well.

By introducing the new deprecation model, the ARB has created a way to signal what will be removed in future revisions. This provides enough time for all developers to move code-bases to newer and better methods. Future versions of GL will remove fixed-function rendering, color index mode, immediate mode, client vertex arrays, and other seldom used portions of older specs. This helps to keep the spec lean and mean, also allowing hardware vendors to better optimize performance and maintain quality. A way for OpenGL to gracefully move forward has been long missing.  With the most recent changes, OpenGL now has the tools to keep open standard graphics current and useful for many different flavors of 3D applications.