One Week To SIGGRAPH OpenGL Announcements

There's just over one week to go until SIGGRAPH Los Angeles 2012 begins. Aside from Valve presenting Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux and talking how they took the Source Engine on Linux with an OpenGL renderer from a mere six FPS to over 300 FPS, there's other interesting talks and announcements coming from the California event.

- On Wednesday, 8 August, there will be a Khronos news conference to "Join us for great news about Khronos APIs!" This will most likely be where OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0 will be introduced. OpenGL 4.3 should be another spec update of "normal" significance while GLES 3.0 is a big one and will make OpenGL ES more like the desktop OpenGL 3 specification, as previously talked about for GLES3. We could also see specification updates to WebGL, OpenCL, and other Khronos APIs too (OpenVG, OpenMAX, OpenWF, etc).

- Pertaining to the last point, it's quite possible that OpenCL 1.3 or even OpenCL 2.0 will be announced as the latest Khronos GPGPU specification. One hour after the news conference is an OpenCL BoF to "Meet designers and implementers of this significant new standard for heterogeneous parallel programming on GPUs and CPUs..."

- Aside from Valve Sofrware at the OpenGL BoF, Barthold Lichtenbelt of NVIDIA will be presenting, Bill Licea-Kane of AMD will be sharing "cool things" with OpenGL, and Kurt Akeley will be providing a perspective on OpenGL after 20 years. Kurt was the co-author of the original OpenGL 1.0 specification and a founding member of Silicon Graphics.

- Among the courses/papers at the 2012 LA SIGGRAPH are on an introduction to modern OpenGL, virtual texturing in software and hardware, beyond programmable shading, GPU shaders for OpenGL 4.x, and graphics programming for the web.

This SIGGRAPH will be celebrating twenty years of OpenGL. The OpenGL 1.0 specification was released in January of 1992 by Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley. More information on SIGGRAPH is available from the conference page.