離上一版 OpenGL 4.1 發表過了差不多一年，Khronos 在 SIGGRAPH 2011 上又發表了新的 OpenGL 4.2 的規格了！官方新聞請參考《Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification》。
其中，比較重要的更新包括了：
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Enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency
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Capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
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Modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
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Packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.
詳細資料請參考「OpenGLR Registry」，文件列表：
- OpenGL 4.2 Core Profile Specification (updated August 8, 2011)
- OpenGL 4.2 Compatibility Profile Specification (updated August 8, 2011)
- OpenGL Shading Language 4.20.6 Specification (updated August 7, 2011)
另外，nVIDIA 也已經針對 GeForce 400（Fermi）以上的顯示卡，發表了支援 OpenGL 4.2 的新驅動程式了∼有需要的人可以到 nVIDIA 的 Developer Zone 下載。