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I'm a bit new to development in ios, I was wondering if the new opengGL ES 3.1 is supported for iOS? and if so where do i download the library?

Reto Koradi
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Gal Kamar
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2 Answers2

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Currently no.

OpenGL ES 3.1 is fresh development. Good thing is that its mainly driver improvement (vs 3.0 requiring new hardware over 2.0). Bad thing is, that Apple have direct competitor, and may wish to withhold OpenGL ES 3.1 features as way for pushing game devs (and other multimedia devs, and compute is not really limited to games), to their API.

Also, Apple currently do not have any OpenGL ES 3.1 driver (nobody have): http://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products#opengles

And OpenGL ES 3.0 is ready for:

  • iPhone5s
  • iPad Air
  • iPad mini

Of course, right now You can start learning OpenGL ES 3.0 just fine. As 3.1 will ad incremental or orthogonal (compute) knowledge.

przemo_li
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Apple's OpenGL ES Programming Guide for iOS gives a step by step checklist for Adopting OpenGL ES 3.0 (I don't know about 3.1). If you have the latest Xcode and tools you have the OpenGL 3 frameworks already. If you are starting an iOS app from scratch, just skip OpenGL ES altogether and learn Metal -- Apple's OpenGL killer.

wcochran
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    There's no ES3.1 support in iOS. But most of the things it adds over 3.0 are extensions that iOS already has, or covered by Metal (which handles compute shaders much better). – rickster Jun 08 '14 at 19:56
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    Could You expand on Metal compute vs OpenGL ES compute, comparison? – przemo_li Jun 23 '14 at 12:51
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    Metal, which is an Apple proprietary API (for now) and runs on their A7 chips, is a much thinner API (closer to the hardware aka "metal"). OpenGL has gathered a ton of cruft over the years and simple state changes can be quite expensive and the separation of CPU and GPU memory spaces is costly. For example, with Metal you precompile your shaders, the CPU/GPU memory is unified, and most state changes are cheap. As a bonus Metal provides "compute" ability akin to OpenCL and CUDA -- so you can use the GPU as a parallel machine for non-graphics tasks via the Metal API. – wcochran Jun 24 '14 at 17:07
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    @wcochran You missed "vs OpenGL ES ***COMPUTE***" – przemo_li Jun 30 '14 at 12:47
  • @przemo_li wow.. I haven't keeping up... CUDA, Metal, Open CL, and now Open GL Compute.. anything else I am missing... – wcochran Jun 30 '14 at 14:09
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    I was asking about some comparision... Specifically between Metal and OpenGL ES 3.1 Compute Shaders. – przemo_li Jul 02 '14 at 11:29