As the primary graphics API for most mobile/embedded devices, including both iOS and Android, Khronos’s work on OpenGL ES is in turn the primary conduit for mobile graphics technology development. Khronos’s first SIGGRAPH 2012 announcement – and certainly the biggest – is that OpenGL ES 3.0 has finally been ratified and the specification released. Like other industry consortiums the group’s president is elected from a member company, with NVIDIA’s Neil Trevett currently holding the Khronos presidency. Khronos membership in turn is a who’s who of technology, and includes virtually every major GPU vendor, both desktop and mobile. The Khronos Group is the industry consortium responsible for OpenGL, OpenCL, WebGL, and other open graphics/multimedia standards and APIs. Overall we’ll see a number of announcements this week, and kicking things off will be the Khronos Group. And though it isn’t really a gaming conference – the show is about professional usage in both senses of the word – a number of those announcements do end up being gaming related.

Outside of individual vendor events, SIGGRAPH is typically the major venue for new technology and standards announcements. NVIDIA and AMD held their events in May and June respectively, and this week the two of them along with the other major players in the GPU space are coming together for the graphics industry’s marquee event: SIGGRAPH 2012. OpenGL 4.As we approach August the technical conference season for graphics is finally reaching its apex. My personal guess is, that the majority of hi-end / mid-range Smartphones and Tablets will see ES3 not before late 2013 / early 2014 (but lets see). It always takes some time till the mobile chips get used in actual smartphones or tablets, but the first generation Mali chips as well as the SGX545 could provide support for ES 3.0 in the near future. GC800 Series from Vivante Corporation, announced august 2012.Mali-T600 Series GPUs from ARM ( T604/T658, T624, T628, T678), first generation was announced in november 2010, second generation in august 2012.

Qualcomm Adreno 320, announced in July 2012.

PowerVR Series6 ‘Rogue’ from ImgTec, announced in january 2012.

PowerVR Series5 SGX545 from ImgTec, announced in january 2010 supports OpenGL 3.2 and thus should also be capable of ES 3.0.

In fact, there are already some chips in the pipeline that support all the features necessary so we could see full ES3 support soon:

With OpenGL ES 3 (codename Halti) was just released, the question arrises who will be the first to provide hardware support in there mobile GPUs.

Does my gpu have opengl 4.3