First hints of OpenGL 4 on MacOS X?
No Mac currently supports more than OpenGL 3.2 even tho all current Macs could support OpenGL 4.x. Apple doesn’t comment on this situation but it seems, that at least some features of newer GL versions made it into the drivers. The lastest GLSL version MacOS supports is 150, at least that’s what glGetString(GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION) tells us. [...]
Is the GPU of the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro too weak?
When Apple can first out with ‘retina’ (high resolution) displays for there Macs the big 15″ notebooks were upgraded first, not the smaller 11″ – 13″ ones. At first you wonder why, as it is probably simpler to build smaller displays with high dpi. But on second thought you realise, that you need a good [...]
Thoughts about the Field of View (on HMDs)
In most VR applications such as 3D games, the field of view (FoV) is done wrong. It isn’t easy to do it right when sitting in front of a PC monitor but it will get simpler when/if head mounted displays (HMDs) become common for gamers – but maybe, it’s not right to do it right… [...]
Tilt Displays – A true 3D display
When talking about 3D displays, we normally think of flat screens that somehow fake a 3D impression. Another way to present a virtual model would be to actually change the surface of your display to fit the virtual surface of the 3D model. Jason Alexander and his colleagues are just experimenting with that idea and presented [...]
OpenGL Programmable Blending – APPLE_shader_framebuffer_fetch
Large parts of the rendering pipeline are user programmable through shaders nowadays. One of the remaining fixed-functions is fragment blending: The new fragments (shaded by the fragment shader) don’t neccessarily have to overwrite the corresponding framebuffer entry, we can set different blending operations. The set of possible operations however is fixed. There have been requests [...]
First impressions of the Oculus Rift
A few days ago at gamescom I had the chance to test the Oculus Rift. If you haven’t heard of it yet, check out the kickstarter project page. The Rift is basically a head mounted display build with a head tracking sensor an a high field of view screen. When you get the device for [...]
Which GPUs support OpenGL ES 3.0?
With OpenGL ES 3 (codename Halti) was just released, the question arrises who will be the first to provide hardware support in there mobile GPUs. In fact, there are already some chips in the pipeline that support all the features necessary so we could see full ES3 support soon: PowerVR Series5 SGX545 from ImgTec, announced [...]
OpenGL 4.3 released
In addition to OpenGL ES 3.0 Khronos also released OpenGL 4.3 today. The latest incarnation of the desktop variant of this rendering API comes with some surprises. OpenGL 4.1 added ES 2 compatibility, so from 2010 onwards GL was a superset of the embedded version. While ES 3 is based on GL 3.3 (without geometry [...]
OpenGL ES 3.0 – Halti has arrived
Khronos just released the specs for OpenGL ES 3.0 during Siggraph earlier today. Rumors were going on for some time and Khronos announced that they will release something. Back in May I wrote “The best thing we can hope for is a clean rewrite of the specification text and OpenGL ES 3.0 – ideally in the same [...]
Book Review: OpenGL Insights
OpenGL Insights edited by Patrick Cozzi and Christophe Riccio is collection of 44 articles about modern OpenGL programming, techniques and related topics. The articles itself account for 653 full colored pages, so each ‘insight’ is a compact portion of knowledge. This book does not only cover (desktop) OpenGL: 35 chapters are dealing with this API while [...]