OpenGL 4.3 Specification Released

The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.3 specification. According to the announcement, OpenGL 4.3 maintains full backward compatibility and enables applications to use new features incrementally, while portably accessing state-of-the-art GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.
The OpenGL 4.3 specification contains many new features, including:
* Compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation.
* Shader storage buffer objects that enable vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment, and compute shaders to read and write large amounts of data and pass significant data between shader stages.
* Texture parameter queries to discover actual supported texture parameter limits on the current platform.
* High-quality ETC2/EAC texture compression as a standard feature.
* Debug capability to receive debugging messages during application development.
* Increased memory security that guarantees an application cannot read or write outside its own buffers into another application’s data.
The full OpenGL4.3 specification is available for immediate download.
Additionally, the Khronos Group announced the immediate release of the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification. According to the company, OpenGL ES 3.0 brings “significant functionality and portability enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API that is used on the majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets.”
The full specification and reference materials for OpenGL ES 3.0 are now available for download.