The Khronos Group announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.4 specification.

In its sovereign functions, the Khronos Group has released the full specification and reference of the
OpenGL^® 4.4, which are available for immediate download here!  

OpenGL^® 4.4, brings:

·        Latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface).

·        unlocks capabilities of graphics hardware

·         maintains full backwards compatibility,

·        Enables applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) across diverse operating systems and platforms.

·        OpenGL 4.4 defines new functionality to streamline the porting of applications and titles from other platforms and APIs.

Connectikpeople has also discovered that, the OpenGL 4.4 specification, the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) Working Group at Khronos has created the first set of formal OpenGL conformance tests since OpenGL 2.0.

In addition, Khronos will offer certification of drivers from version 3.3, and full certification is mandatory for OpenGL 4.4 and onwards.

According to Khronos this will help reduce differences between multiple vendors’ OpenGL drivers, resulting in enhanced portability for developers.

Henceforth new functionality in the OpenGL 4.4 specification includes:

Buffer Placement Control (GL_ARB_buffer_storage): enhances memory flexibility and efficiency.

Efficient Asynchronous Queries (GL_ARB_query_buffer_object) : provides significantly boosted performance for applications .

Shader Variable Layout (GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts): full control over variable layout inside uniform blocks and enables shaders to specify transform feedback variables and buffer layout.

Efficient Multiple Object Binding (GL_ARB_multi_bind): enable an application to bind or unbind sets of objects with one API call instead of separate commands for each bind operation.

And Streamlined Porting of Direct3D applications.

Regarding the extensions released alongside the OpenGL 4.4 specification , we have:  

Bindless Texture Extension (GL_ARB_bindless_texture: this means, Shaders can now access an effectively unlimited number of texture and image resources directly by virtual addresses. Sparse Texture Extension (GL_ARB_sparse_texture):
Enables handling of huge textures that are much larger than the GPUs physical memory.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL^®, OpenGL^® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.