OpenGL 4.2 improves shader performance, texture handling, & speeds repositioning of complex objects

New functionality in the today announced OpenGL 4.2 specification includes enabling shaders with atomic counters for things like object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency, capturing GPU-tessellated geometry to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated, modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements, and enhanced transfer of data between shader stages.

Christophe Riccio has published a review of the new features in OpenGL 4.2 on Google Docs

Any FirePro graphics card will be able to run applications that use 4.2.

• AMD OpenGL 4.2 Beta Catalyst Preview Driver for Windows
• AMD OpenGL 4.2 Beta Catalyst Preview Driver for Linux