05/01/2015 January 2015 OpenGL hardware matrix
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It has been six months since my last report on the landscape of exposed OpenGL extensions by drivers.
Nevertheless, the ecosystem hasn't evolved so much with no change for Apple despite MacOSX 10.10 release; basically no change for Intel drivers; and just a handful of OpenGL 4.5 extensions for AMD.
- AMD: 7 total; 5 core; 1 ARB; 1 vendor
- Apple: 0 total
- Intel: 2 total; 1 ARB; 1 vendor
- NVIDIA: 33 total (BAM!); 12 core; 3 ARB; 18 vendors
Obviously, if we don't care about cross-platform support, it's a great time to work on NVIDIA with Maxwell 200 series: We have been waiting for a while for OpenGL 4.5 drivers on GM204 but we finally have them. NVIDIA also published a bunch of extensions to expose all sort of great new hardware features: NV_conservative_raster, NV_sample_locations or NV_fragment_shader_interlock to only mention my favourites.
I personnally consider GM204 the second best chip ever produced by NVIDIA after G80. Not as crazy as G80 for the time but certainly more healthy.
Additionally, NVIDIA continues to invest on low CPU overhead with the release of bindless uniform buffer but also announcing NV_command_list including code samples. Both features are designed for Fermi and newer GPUs.
Furthermore, NVIDIA is shipping OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android extension pack on desktop through the OpenGL ES profile.
Finally, because it seems it's not enough, NVIDIA has released OpenGL samples for Maxwell new features but also additional samples for ES3.1 or multi draw indirect.
Well, it was a *smashing* 2014 second semester for NVIDIA.
