Khronos Debuts OpenGL ES 3.2 & New GL Extensions, But No Vulkan This Week

It's SIGGRAPH week! Our embargo was just lifted by The Khronos Group for talking about their exciting specification updates and more that they'll be sharing with the attendees at this annual, leading graphics conference in Los Angeles. In this article are the details on the new OpenGL ES 3.2 specification, new desktop OpenGL extensions, the Safety Critical Working Group, and some talk about SPIR-V/Vulkan but the new graphics API specification itself isn't being released from SIGGRAPH.

Here are the brief highlights of The Khronos Group announcements for SIGGRAPH 2015:

- New OpenGL extensions have been released today.

- OpenGL ES 3.2 is available today! OpenGL ES 3.2 includes work from the Android Extension Pack (AEP) plus other improvements to better mobile graphics.

- The Khronos Safety Critical Working Group is planning a OpenGL SC 2.0 specification for release in 2016 that's derived from OpenGL ES 2/3. In the future a new generation API for graphics/compute will likely come that's based off SPIR-V and Vulkan.

- There are some updates to the OpenCL 2.0 specification.

- SPIR-V open-source work is advancing greatly.

- Google has officially confirmed Vulkan support is coming to Android!

- The Vulkan specification is still planned for release later this year along with initial driver implementations, but sadly nothing is ready for release this week although some Khronos partners will be demoing some things at SIGGRAPH.

- Mir and Wayland will have first-class support with Vulkan's Window System Integration.

Alright, now for the more verbose explanations. Before getting started, thanks to Neil Trevett, the Khronos President and NVIDIA's VP of Mobile Ecosystem, for the pre-briefing last week to provide an update on the state of Vulkan, answer my Linux related questions, etc.

New OpenGL Extensions

Khronos is today releasing some new OpenGL extensions for desktop implementations, but it's not a full-blown revision. There wasn't enough for them to release say OpenGL 4.6 or OpenGL 5.0, but there's still some good stuff within the new extensions. They're still committed to revising OpenGL and new revisions will come in the future, but just for SIGGRAPH 2015 this year they decided against christening a new OpenGL version.

The run down on the new OpenGL extensions are covered on the previous page followed by the other SIGGRAPH 2015 Khronos news.