Khronos Publishes Its Slides About OpenGL-Next

Earlier this month at SIGGRAPH Vancouver we were surprised yet delighted by the news of Khronos developing a next-generation graphics API following OpenGL 4.5. All of the Khronos Group slides about OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL-Next, and their other industry-standard APIs have now been published from their SIGGRAPH track.

While our few articles about "OpenGL-Next" and other SIGGRAPH coverage have already detailed most of what's publicly known about this next-gen graphics API, here's a recap from their slides:

- OpenGL-Next is a ground-up design of a modern 3D+Compute API and will break compatibility with existing OpenGL implementations.

- The new API seeks to unify OpenGL and OpenGL ES API -- one API to rule both desktop and mobile worlds.

- There will be explicit control over GPU and CPU workloads with the application/game expressing to the driver what it wants.

- The new API will be high performance and predictable.

- The new API will be multi-threading and multi-core friendly with great reductions to the CPU overhead.

- There will be a common shading language intermediate representation (IR) for greater reliability and portability.

- Like OpenGL, the new API will be architecture-neutral with full support for tile-based rendering and direct rendering.

- There will be enhanced conformance testing.

- This new initiative is "NOT" going to be a "multi-year, design-by-committee process."

- Among the organizations participating in the new OpenGL-Next initiative are Pixar, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA, Epic Games, Unity, AMD, Oculus VR, Apple, ARM, VALVE, Hi Corp, Intel, Imagination, Blizzard, Sony, Broadcom, MediaTek, Google, EA, RTT, TransGaming, Mobica, and Vivante.

All of the SIGGRAPH 2014 slides for The Khronos Group BoF sessions can be found at Khronos.org.