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

OpenGL ES 3.2

Last year Google announced the Android Extension Pack as a superset of OpenGL ES 3.1. The AEP was officially added to Android Lollipop to provide extra features -- like tessellation -- over what was officially in the GLES 3.1 revision. The OpenGL ES 3.2 update that's out today is largely made up of the AEP additions, which are already present in desktop OpenGL.

OpenGL ES 3.2 makes official the tessellation extensions, geometry shaders, ASTC texture compression, floating point render targets, debug and robustness extensions, and enhanced texture targets and blending operations.

Safety Critical Working Group

For those into using graphics for avionics and automobiles, a new OpenGL SC revision is expected in 2016... It will be a big update considering OpenGL SC 1.0 is based on OpenGL ES 1.0. The SC 1.0 specification was released in 2005. While OpenGL SC may be easily forgotten about, it does boast big potential going forward in areas like drones, self-driving cars, etc.

OpenCL 2.0 Updates

The OpenCL 2.0 specification has been updated with bug fixes and clarifications. There's also now OpenCL C++ headers for OpenCL 2.0 officially released. NVIDIA is also announcing a new desktop OpenCL 1.2 implementation for their drivers.

SPIR-V

The SPIR-V intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+ was updated last week. The version is still 0.99 but should be firmed up to 1.0 when Vulkan is ready. The Khronos Group continues to be pleased by SPIR-V's open-source adoption and new projects already working to utilize it. It's possible already to deal with SPIR-V from Go, Rust, C#, etc. Once there is the SPIR-V LLVM back-end, it will be possible to deal go to/from SPIR-V with many other languages for running them on the GPU.