And because few developers will target OpenGL 4.3 right away, that won’t change. Because S3TC is a required part of the Direct3D specification and all desktop GPUs support Direct3D, S3TC has been a de-facto OpenGL standard for nearly 10 years now. Practically speaking, this won’t make a huge difference to desktop developers right now. The aforementioned standardization around ETC applies to both OpenGL ES and OpenGL, which means that starting with OpenGL 4.3, desktop OpenGL will have a standard texture compression format. One of Khronos’s missteps with OpenGL ES 2.0 was that it wasn’t until OpenGL 4.1 in 2010 that desktop OpenGL become a proper superset of OpenGL ES 2.0, which they’re rectifying this time around by launching OpenGL ES and its equivalent OpenGL at the same time.īecause OpenGL ES 3.0 is largely taken from desktop OpenGL in the first place, there aren’t a ton of changes due to this. Moving on to looking at OpenGL 4.3’s features, unsurprisingly, one of the big additions to OpenGL 4.3 is to add the necessary features to make it a proper superset of OpenGL ES 3.0. OpenGL ES 3.0 Superset & ETC Texture Compression At the same time desktop OpenGL still has a long way to go to recapture its glory days in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, so Khronos is doing what they can to spur that on. Khronos of course would like to change that, so when Valve Software says that they’re going to be porting Source over to Linux (thereby increasing the audience for OpenGL games) it’s of quite some interest to Khronos. On Windows OpenGL usage has never been lower the only AAA game engine still based on OpenGL is id Tech 5, which with the termination of licensing by id is only used internally. This is not to say that it’s unimportant, but it will bring a smaller list of new features to the table.Īt the same time though, this also marks what may potentially be an interesting inflection point for OpenGL gaming on the desktop. Unlike OpenGL ES this is only a much smaller point update.

Alongside OpenGL ES 3.0, desktop OpenGL is also being iterated upon today with the launch of OpenGL 4.3.

Opengl 4.3 amd