OpenGL 4

[treeform]

rastergrid.com/blog/2010/03/a-br … 3-and-4-0/
^ this has very nice overview of what is new in openGL 4.

One thing that caught me by surprise is this:

ARB_draw_indirectb
We’ve arrived to the most culminating point in the list of features introduced. It is hard to say such a thing, but in my humble opinion this extension can be the Holy Grail of next generation rendering engines. I will explain why I think so…

The extension provides a way to source the parameters of instanced draw commands from within buffer objects. One naive use case would be to put all the rendering command parameters to a buffer object using the host application and then draw everything with a single command. While this simple method already has its benefits, this feature provides much more flexibility than this. The most revolutionary is that, using this extension, one is able to generate instanced draw commands with the GPU on-the-fly. Together with ARB_transform_feedback3 it is possible to write a completely GPU based scene management system.

No more NodePath? Just shaders?

[drwr]

Hah. Sounds a lot like “display lists” from OpenGL 1.0. Everything old is new again.

Have fun writing your game logic in shader language.

David