BEAVERTON, OR – The Khronos Group
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an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, has launched the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification.
The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements.
“Khronos was proud to release OpenGL 4.6 while celebrating the standard’s 25th anniversary over the summer. Since then, an enormous amount of work has gone into enhancing the associated conformance tests. The new test suite makes adoption smoother for API implementers, and enables developers to benefit from the reliable availability of the new features and improvements made in the latest iteration of the OpenGL standard,” said Piers Daniell, OpenGL Working Group chair at Khronos and principal engineer at NVIDIA. “The Khronos OpenGL Working Group is committed to support and enhance this vital industry standard as its availability forges ahead into in its second quarter century.”
Khronos members Intel and NVIDIA have already successfully made submissions to the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, showcasing reliable cross-vendor operation, and enabling the submitted products to become officially conformant. Information on all OpenGL conformant products can be found on the Khronos Conformant Product Registry. Any company, whether or not a Khronos member, is welcome to become an OpenGL 4.6 adopter and submit conformance test results for OpenGL Working Group review and approval. Those who pass certification will be able to use the royalty-free OpenGL trademark and gain protection under the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework.
The OpenGL Working Group and Khronos members have invested heavily in enhancing the conformance tests for OpenGL 4.6, with significantly increased testing transparency, and enhanced test coverage. Features enjoying improved testing include direct state access, robustness, GLSL, framebuffer, renderbuffer objects and many more. OpenGL 4.6 also shares test source with OpenGL ES and has added coverage for numerous ARB and KHR extensions used across APIs, as well all the new features in OpenGL 4.6.
OpenGL is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, leveraged by software developers to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications for a wide variety of platforms including PCs, workstations, and supercomputers. OpenGL provides flexibility through being network-transparent, as well as window-system and operating-system independent. It is deployed across CAD, energy, manufacturing, game development, content creation, architecture, virtual reality, and medical markets.
The latest iteration of OpenGL includes added functionality through ARB extensions, such as SPIR-V support, reduced driver overhead, enhanced support for Direct3D compatibility, improved visual quality of textured scenes, and reduced CPU overhead associated with rendering batches of geometry.