The new gDEBugger V4.2 adds full support for Frame Buffer Objects (FBOs). It enables developers to view allocated FBOs and Renderbuffer objects, FBOs attachment points (depth, color and stencil) and Renderbuffers data as an image and raw data. This version adds full support for OpenGL context sharing. Shared objects are now displayed in each and every render context that shares them. In addition, NVIDIA GLExpert driver (v2.0) was integrated into this version. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Windows and Linux operating systems.

Lightsprint released new version of Lightsprint SDK, realistic lighting middleware for both realtime and offline lightmap building. New version adds Linux and Playstation 3 support, improves real-time GI rendering based on OpenGL API, improves COLLADA support, adds tone mapping, adds faster GI techniques and demos. 3D Render Ltd licensed Lightsprint SDK.

Wired magazine’s Bryan Gardiner says: Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks. In many ways, it’s the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language. Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard. Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group. If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility’s super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors. Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn’t your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.

The Khronos™ Group announced today the formation of a new Compute Working Group to create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous data and task parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. The creation of this open standard is intended to enable and encourage diverse applications to leverage all available platform compute resources on a wide range of platforms.

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines. Included are Improvements to the COLLADA 1.3 loader, support for Milkshape 1.8 files, Enhanced .3ds, .obj loaders, Microsoft .x file animation playback improvements; Added X11 support on OSX; Several speed optimizations and tons of bugfixes, API enhancements and other small improvements.

ARM has rolled out highly optimized source code versions of the OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) libraries for decoding the AAC and MP3 formats in the audio domain, and decoding the MPEG-4 and H.264 formats in the video domain.

AMD has reached a new milestone in the mobile graphics industry becoming the first 3D graphics technology provider to achieve OpenGL® ES 2.0 conformance certification. AMD OpenGL ES 2.0 mobile graphics technology, which will be included in AMD processors, is based on the same AMD Unified Shader Architecture powering the Microsoft® Xbox 360™ video game console. OpenGL ES 2.0 enables rapid rendering of cutting-edge 3D graphics for a variety of consumer electronics devices. The AMD OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation achieved conformance when they met key feature requirements while being rigorously tested and reviewed by the Khronos Group, the independent industry consortium responsible for the development, promotion and certification of the OpenGL ES standard.

DMP announced three new courses, two getting started and one advanced course. The first OpenGL ES Programming training course (advanced) will be next week on June 20th, the second OpenGL ES Programming training course (OpenGL ES Shader) will be in July, while the third GLSL Programming training course (getting started) will follow in August. For more information on these courses, please visit the Khronos Group events page.