OpenGL Celebrates Its 30th Birthday

It was on this day in 1992 that Silicon Graphics (SGI) released OpenGL to the world.

While Vulkan has taken much of the spotlight in recent years, OpenGL really kicked things off for a cross-vendor, industry graphics API standard. OpenGL remains in widespread use today and does continue seeing new extensions, optimizations to existing OpenGL drivers, and there is no shortage of software out there still relying upon OpenGL. Especially in the workstation segment, OpenGL will still likely be in use for years to come. With efforts like ANGLE and Zink, OpenGL accelerated support will still be around indefinitely in running OpenGL atop other graphics APIs.

A graphic from The Khronos Group for marking 30 years of OpenGL.

OpenGL has certainly advanced a great deal over the past 30 years with now supporting SPIR-V shaders, more efficient driver execution, compute shaders, various forms of texture compression, and a heck of a lot more. OpenGL has its wrinkles but still looking pretty darn good at 30 years old in the software space.

Happy anniversary to the successful launch of OpenGL 1.0! 30 years ago, SGI created the OpenGL ARB and released the OpenGL 1.0 specification leading to a revolution in graphics. pic.twitter.com/NqYNzFS9iY

— OpenGL (@opengl) June 30, 2022