OpenGL 3.1 Released - Proof is in the Pudding

Khronos and the OpenGL ARB have done it! OpenGL 3.1 and GLSL 1.40 have been released on the 6 month schedule promised at SIGGRAPH 2008. As promised, most of the legacy features marked as deprecated have been removed. No more display lists. No more immediate mode rendering. No more fixed function pipeline. The cruft accumulated over the last 17 years has been cleaned up to create a simplified and performant 3D graphics API. OpenGL 3.1 really does match the current generation of programmable graphics devices.

In addition to removing deprecated functionality, OpenGL 3.1 adds a bunch of handy new features.

Uniform buffer objects
The first and biggest is support for uniform buffer objects. This new object allows a shader to group uniforms together into a block of uniform memory. New interfaces make updating groups of uniforms easier and much more efficient. These new buffers can also be shared between programs, reducing wasted memory usage and shader uniform-reload time.

Texture buffer objects and Copy buffers
Texture buffer objects were also introduced into core OpenGL 3.1. This new texture type allows generic buffers to be attached to a texture as a 1D array. Now general buffer data is accessible to shaders through new fetch functions. Additionally, a copy mechanism (GL_EXT_copy_buffers) that allows for direct accelerated buffer-to-buffer copies has been added. This extends the benefits of generic buffer objects and creates interesting opportunities with multithreaded load/execute algorithms.

Instanced rendering
Instanced rendering has been added to core, allowing apps to draw multiple copies of similar objects without incurring system bandwidth costs (I mentioned this inadvertently in an earlier post).

Other features
Primitive restart, SNORM textures and several other new features were also added.

OpenGL is continuing to march forward with progressive revisions bringing new functionality to 3D developers. AMD will follow with full driver support for OpenGL 3.1 shortly.