OpenGL 3.2 Specification Officially Released

Last month when NVIDIA had published their first official 190.xx driver beta, it was discovered that there was early OpenGL 3.2 support. There was no OpenGL 3.2 specification out in the hands of public developers, but with NVIDIA working closely with the Khronos Group, it wasn't too surprising. They had also released another OpenGL 3.2 driver update and we suspected that OpenGL 3.2 would be officially unveiled at the SIGGRAPH conference. This graphics industry conference started today in New Orleans, and sure enough, OpenGL 3.2 is now out!

The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 3.2 specification this morning via a press release. OpenGL 3.2 is designed to increase the graphics performance and visual quality of applications along with better portability for Direct3D applications. As part of OpenGL 3.2, there is now also GLSL 1.5. Version 1.5 is another update to the GL Shading Language.

The Khronos Group has also defined five new ARB extensions with OpenGL 3.2 that are designed for use with newer GPUs / drivers. NVIDIA already has a beta out of their OpenGL 3.2 Linux driver while a stable one will likely be a few weeks out. AMD is too working on OpenGL 3.2 for their Catalyst Linux driver, but based upon their past actions, it will likely be a few months before seeing such support. When it comes to the open-source graphics drivers, OpenGL 3.2 / GLSL 1.5 is now yet another thing to be worked on for Gallium3D with VMware currently working on a OpenGL 3.1 state tracker. Intel might end up adding OpenGL 3.x support to classic Mesa for use in their 3D hardware driver, but that is still being decided.

The OpenGL 3.2 specification can be viewed within the OpenGL Registry.