Based on Basemark’s performance benchmarking, Vulkan enables consistently more than 50% faster graphics performance compared to OpenGL ES on automotive graphics rendering use cases.

As Godot 4.0 with Vulkan gets closer, the developers have posted an update to clarify the direction that Godot 4 is taking for OpenGL ES. The renderer design and all resulting code has been re-implemented entirely from scratch in order to support Vulkan and modern rendering techniques. This will have taken close to three at the time of release. As such, OpenGL ES will not be supported in Godot 4. The goal is to support OpenGL ES 3 starting in Godot 4.1. There is more information which you can learn about from the Godot Engine team.

In this blog from Collabora, Erik Faye-Lund brings us up to date on upstream development, OpenGL 4.6 support, OpenGL compatibility profile, OpenGL ES 3.1 support, Lavapipe and continuous integration, Windows support, macOS support and more…

In this blog from Arm, Hans-Kristian Arntzen looks at how to implement deferred shading, a style of rendering which is still quite common. The deferred techniques have evolved over time, but the fundamental remains where a G-buffer is rendered, and lighting is computed based on that G-buffer data. This decouples geometry information from shading. Most of the innovation in the last years in the deferred space has revolved around reformulating the lighting pass, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Panfrost is an open source driver for Arm Mali GPUs and has announced that it now supports OpenGL ES 3.1 on several Arm Mali GPUs. While Panfrost has had limited support for compute shaders on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) for use in TensorFlow Lite, the latest work extends the support to more GPUs and adds complementary features required by the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, like indirect draws and no-attachment framebuffers.

Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! The ‘astcenc’ ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTC’s flexible capabilities. This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators. Learn move about astcenc 2.0 in the Khronos blog ‘Create ASTC textures faster with the new astcenc 2.0 open source compression tool’ written by our guest, Peter Harris, from Arm.

Arm has released a new comprehensive ASTC Guide to help developers who wish to use ASTC technology to compress textures for 3D games and applications. The new guide contains a detailed ASTC algorithm overview, explains ASTC benefits, provides developers advice for achieving best compression results, and contains information on popular encoding tools—as well as usage with game engines.

Basemark announced the ability for anyone to objectively compare devices ranging from powerful desktops to low-powered embedded systems across all major operating systems. This is all possible with a new version of Basemark GPU, available now.

Basemark GPU 1.2 features the following:

• Operating system support: Android, iOS, Linux, MacOS and Windows
• Graphics API support: DirectX 12, Metal 2, OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.0
• Three different modes: High Quality for powerful desktop computer, Medium Quality for laptops and powerful mobile devices such as premium smartphones and Simple Quality for embedded devices and entry level smartphones

Collabora has been working on OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Mesa’s Panfrost Gallium3D driver. Panfrost’s OpenGL ES 3.0 support has now landed in upstream Mesa 20.1 and works with a mainline Linux kernel. While the code is still experimental, it can be accessed compiling the latest Mesa and setting the environment variable PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gles3.

This article describes the implementation of soft particles in pure WebGL / OpenGL ES without any 3rd party library or engine used. This tutorial is based on a WebGL port of Android live wallpaper 3D Buddha Live Wallpaper. Source code is available on GitHub.

Diligent Engine is a modern cross-platform abstraction layer for Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D11 and Direct3D12. In release v2.4.b, Diligent Engine enabled MSAA and bindless resources, implemented GPU queries, added new tutorials as well as made major improvements to code quality assurance by enabling automated unit tests, format validation and static code analysis.

​Google acquired and open-sourced GraphicsFuzz a little over a year ago. GraphicsFuzz is no longer about only OpenGL, OpenGL ES and GLSL shaders but also operates on SPIR-V shaders for consumption by Vulkan drivers. There are also GLSL/SPIR-V shader reducers in addition to the fuzzer that relies upon randomized metamorphic testing.

​The Khronos Group has published a maintenance release to OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 with bug fixes from GitHub, the old Khronos Bugzilla issue tracker and from internal issues. OpenGL 4.6 changes are in the OpenGL Specification Core with Changes PDF starting on page 736. OpenGL ES 3.2 changes are in the OpenGL ES 3.2 Specification PDF on page 539.

​RenderDoc 1.5 has been released. Changes include: SPIR-V reflection and disassembly has been refactored to be more reliable and is based on the publicly available grammar json; Vulkan has a new replay-time optimisation which takes advantage of the above replay options dialog; OpenGL has a low-memory optimisation to defer copying initial contents of textures and buffers that are rarely modified; Support for twenty-one (21) Vulkan extensions have been added; Support for fifteen (15) OpenGL extensions have been added along with whitelisting of some OpenGL ES extensions that were already supported. A complete list of changes and improvements is available in the Latest release notes.

Basemark GPU 1.2 adds iOS and macOS to our list of already supported operating systems: Android, Windows, and Linux. We include OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenGL 4.5, Vulkan 1.0, DirectX 12 and Metal. With the new features in Basemark GPU 1.2, you will be able to analyze and compare the 3D graphics performance of smartphones, tablets, notebooks, Windows and Linux desktop PCs, etc.