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While OpenGL and Direct3D have not necessarily been stagnant over the last half-decade or so, both APIs have been in a mature phase where both are stable products that receive relatively minor feature updates as opposed to more sweeping overhauls. Since reaching that stability there has been quite a bit of speculation over what would come next – or indeed whether anything would come next – and in the last year we have seen the answer to that in a series of new graphics APIs from hardware and software vendors alike. In all of these announcements thus far, we have seen vendors focus on similar issues and plan to enact similar solutions. AMD’s Mantle, Microsoft’s Direct3D 12, and Apple’s Metal all reflect the fact that there is a general consensus among the graphics industry over where the current bottlenecks lie, where graphics hardware will be going in the future, and where graphics APIs need to go in response to these issues. The end result has been the emergence of several new APIs, all meaningfully different from each other but none the less all going in the same direction and all implementing the same style solutions. That common solution is a desire by all parties to scrape away the abstraction that has defined high level graphics APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL for so much of their lives. As graphics hardware becomes more advanced it has become more similar and more flexible; the need to abstract and hide the differences between GPU architectures has become less important, and the abstraction itself has become the issue. By removing the abstraction and giving developers more direct control over the underlying hardware, these next generation APIs aim to improve performance, ease API implementation, and give developers more flexibility than ever before. It’s this subject which brings us to today’s final announcement from Khronos. At 22 years old OpenGL is the oldest of the 3D graphics APIs in common use today, and in 2014 it is facing many of the same issues as the other abstraction-heavy APIs. OpenGL continues to serve its intended purposes well, but the need for a lower level (or at least greater controlling) API exists in the OpenGL ecosystem as much as it does in any other ecosystem. For that reason today Khronos is announcing the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative to develop the next generation of OpenGL. More here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8363/khronos-announces-next-generation-opengl-initiative
