Khronos 繼去年在 Siggraph 2011 發布 OpenGL 4.2 後，在今年的 Siggraph 2012，果然又發布新的 OpenGL 4.3 的規格了！官方的新聞稿，是《Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.3 Specification with Major Enhancements》，完整的規格也已經可以在 http://www.opengl.org/registry/ 下載了。
而要說這一班最重要的改變是什麼？應該就是 OpenGL 和 DirectX 一樣，也加入了計算用的「Compute Shader」了！以規格書封面的架構圖（右圖）來看，Computer shader 應該也算是獨立於 graphics pipeline 之外的 shader 了～
其他重要的新功能，官方也條列如下：
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compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation such as image, volume, and geometry processing within the context of the graphics pipeline;
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shader storage buffer objects that enable vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment and compute shaders to read and write large amounts of data and pass significant data between shader stages;
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texture parameter queries to discover actual supported texture parameter limits on the current platform;
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high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
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debug capability to receive debugging messages during application development;
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texture views for interpreting textures in many different ways without duplicating the texture data itself;
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indirect multi-draw that enables the GPU to compute and store parameters for multiple draw commands in a buffer object and re-use those parameters with one draw command, particularly efficient for rendering many objects with low triangle counts;
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increased memory security that guarantees that an application cannot read or write outside its own buffers into another application’s data;
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a multi-application robustness extension that ensures that an application that causes a GPU reset will not affect any other running applications.
另外，這次 Khronos 也同時發布了新的 OpenGL ES 3.0 的規格，希望可以將行動裝置上的圖形顯示帶到下一個層次；官方新聞稿為《Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 3.0 Specification to Bring Mobile 3D Graphics to the Next Level》，詳細的規格資料可以到 http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/ 下載。官方條列的新功能列表如下：
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multiple enhancements to the rendering pipeline to enable acceleration of advanced visual effects including: occlusion queries, transform feedback, instanced rendering and support for four or more rendering targets;
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high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
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a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations;
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greatly enhanced texturing functionality including guaranteed support for floating point textures, 3D textures, depth textures, vertex textures, NPOT textures, R/RG textures, immutable textures, 2D array textures, swizzles, LOD and mip level clamps, seamless cube maps and sampler objects;
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an extensive set of required, explicitly sized texture and render-buffer formats, reducing implementation variability and making it much ea sier to write portable applications.
額外參考：
最後，這次 nVIDIA 也立刻就推出了支援 OpenGL 4.3 的驅動程式（Windows 版本編號為 305.53），有興趣的人可以到 nVIDIA 的開發者網站下載。而 glew 也很快地，馬上就推出支援 OpenGL 4.3 的 1.9.0 版了～所以如果是使用 nVIDIA 顯示卡的開發者，現在應該已經可以開始測試 OpenGL 4.3 了。