Back to writing software rasterizers?
Last week, Khronos Group and, more specifically, the ARB released OpenGL 4.0. It’s been approximately six months since OpenGL 3.2 and less than a year since OpenGL 3.1. So ARB has been eager and working hard to get OpenGL up to speed with Direct3D. Maybe even a little too eager, one might think, as such a rapid pace of publishing new specification versions will most likely be confusing to the adopters. The developers are still barely using the 2.x line of the API, so adopting 4.0 can take a good while. Oh, and you need compatible drivers from HW vendors, too – something which will probably take a while as well.
Anyway, the spec is out and it’s time to take a look at what’s new. The new features include double precision floats, shader subroutines, instanced geometry shaders and arrays, as well as a heap of other new additions. Most importantly, however, OpenGL 4.0 introduces two new shader stages: sample shaders and tessellation shaders. The former enable the developers to have more control over sample operations, such as anti aliasing, while the latter offer mechanisms for programming [Continue Reading...]


