Computer Graphics World

Khronos Enriches Cross-platform 3D Graphics with OpenGL 4.2 The Khronos Group, an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, and graphics and dynamic media on a wide vari- ety of platforms and devices, has released the OpenGL 4.2 specifi cation, bringing the latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API. OpenGL 4.2 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of the royalty-free specifi - cation while maintaining full backward compatibility—enabling applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The OpenGL 4.2 specifi cation has been defi ned by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. The OpenGL 4.2 spec contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application perfor- mance. (The full specifi cation can be downloaded at www. opengl.org/registry.) New functionality in the OpenGL 4.2 specifi cation enables shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic to read- modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single rendering pass order-independent transparency. It also supports the capture of GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback, to enable NEWS: STANDARDS Adobe Enables 3D Games with Flash Player 11, AIR 3 Adobe Systems has announced Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 software to enable the next generation of immersive application experiences across devices and platforms, including Android, Apple iOS (via AIR), BlackBerry Tablet OS, Mac OS, Windows, connected TVs, and other platforms. As the game console for the Web, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 allow game PRODUCT: WEB 4 October/November 2011 publishers to instantly deliver console- quality 2D and 3D games over the Inter- net to nearly all PCs and many other devices. Media companies can take advantage of new features to deliver protected feature-length, cinema-quality HD video through the Web, in mobile apps, and even with surround sound for connected TVs. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 provide a cross-device entertainment platform, enabling the best in online gaming and premium video, while helping content publishers extend their reach. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 offer a number of new features, including: accelerated 2D/3D graphics, AIR native extensions, captive runtime, content protection, HD video quality across platforms, and more. complex objects to be effi ciently repositioned and replicated. In addition, the spec allows for modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for signifi cant performance improvements. Also, it enables the packing of multiple 8- and 16-bit values into a single 32-bit value for effi cient shader processing with signifi cantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, which is especially useful when transferring data between shader stages. In other news, the Khronos Group widened its call for participation in its two newest working groups: StreamInput and WebCL. StreamInput is defi ning a cross-platform API for advanced sensor processing and user interaction, and WebCL is creating JavaScript bindings to OpenCL to enable heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 Web browsers. "Advances in computational power on a wide range of plat- forms and devices are greatly accelerating sensor innovation, from nine-axis, motion-positional sensors, to depth-ranging cameras. StreamInput will drive the market adoption of advanced sensors by enabling input fusion innovation under a common API that provides portability to application devel- opers," says Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice presi- dent of mobile content at Nvidia. "WebCL is the natural exten- sion of the WebGL and OpenCL work already under way at Khronos, and continues the trend of evolving HTML5, not only to support advanced Web experiences, but also to become a full-fl edged application platform with access to advanced device capabilities."

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