OpenGL 4.0 is here and ready to compute
Announced today at the 2010 Games Developers Conference, the latest version of OpenGL is available to developers for use. A cross-platform system for rendering graphics, OpenGL and it’s variants, such as OpenGL|ES for mobile devices, basically deliver the 3D goods on just about any platform.
OpenGL 4.0 builds on past iterations, offloading more geometry and lighting tasks to the graphics processor. One of the biggest impacts that end users will see is battery life on mobile devices such as smartphones and notebook computers when using 3D applications. Normally ‘3D applications’ would mean ‘games’, but over the past few years, graphics cards (GPU) have increasingly been taking over other computational tasks, from video rendering to physics calculations, leading to less system overhead and better performance.
Seeing more tasks offloaded to the GPU and leading to better battery life and better performance is something anyone can get behind.
[full Press Release]
