The Khronos group, at the Game Developers Conference, announced the OpenGL 4.0 API specifications. OpenGL 4.0 is set to rival DirectX 11 in being able to make use of hardware tessellation offered by this generation's GPUs, drawing of data generated by OpenGL, OpenCL, or other external APIs without any intervention from the CPU, support for 64-bit Double Precision Floating Point shader operations, and a number of performance improvements. OpenGL is a multi-platform API that can run on operating environments such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, certain gaming consoles, as well as a low-resource API for mobile devices. A list of main feature changes in OpenGL 4.0 are as follows:

• Two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU
• Per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility
• Drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention
• Shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;
• Separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality
• Performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query

"The release of OpenGL 4.0 is a major step forward in bringing state-of-the-art functionality to cross-platform graphics acceleration, and strengthens OpenGL's leadership position as the epicenter of 3D graphics on the web, on mobile devices as well as on the desktop," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA is pleased to announce that its upcoming Fermi-based graphics accelerators will fully support OpenGL 4.0 at launch."

"AMD sees the release of OpenGL 4.0 as another major accomplishment for the OpenGL ARB," said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of design engineering at AMD. "AMD contributes to the Khronos workgroups, and we consistently find that Khronos is successful at developing healthy, thriving, and evolving open standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL."

Driver updates by NVIDIA and AMD will carry the OpenGL 4.0 installable client driver, enabling support for the API by existing and upcoming shader model 5.0 graphics processors.