OpenGL 4.6 adds SPIR-V and anisotropic texture filtering

Since the introduction of Vulkan, OpenGL moved to the background but now there's finally a new release. OpenGL 4.6 adds a bunch of features including SPIR-V shader support and anisotropic filtering. AF took a long time to make it into OpenGL due to intellectual property issues, but now it's finally there.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL® 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V™ shaders.

SPIR-V is a Khronos-defined standard intermediate language for parallel compute and graphics, which enables content creators to simplify their shader authoring and management pipelines while providing significant source shading language flexibility. OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders to the core specification, guaranteeing that SPIR-V shaders will be widely supported by OpenGL implementations.

OpenGL 4.6 adds the functionality of these ARB extensions to OpenGL’s core specification:

GL_ARB_gl_spirv and GL_ARB_spirv_extensions to standardize SPIR-V support for OpenGL

GL_ARB_indirect_parameters and GL_ARB_shader_draw_parameters for reducing the CPU overhead associated with rendering batches of geometry

GL_ARB_pipeline_statistics_query and GL_ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query standardize OpenGL support for features available in Direct3D

GL_ARB_texture_filter_anisotropic (based on GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic) brings previously IP encumbered functionality into OpenGL to improve the visual quality of textured scenes

GL_ARB_polygon_offset_clamp (based on GL_EXT_polygon_offset_clamp) suppresses a common visual artifact known as a “light leak” associated with rendering shadows

GL_ARB_shader_atomic_counter_ops and GL_ARB_shader_group_vote add shader intrinsics supported by all desktop vendors to improve functionality and performance

GL_KHR_no_error reduces driver overhead by allowing the application to indicate that it expects error-free operation so errors need not be generated

In addition to the above features being added to OpenGL 4.6, the following are being released as extensions:

GL_KHR_parallel_shader_compile allows applications to launch multiple shader compile threads to improve shader compile throughput

WGL_ARB_create_context_no_error and GXL_ARB_create_context_no_error allow no error contexts to be created with WGL or GLX that support the GL_KHR_no_error extension

A full run-down of what's new can be found at Khronos.