AMD Announces Planned Support for OpenGL 3.1; OpenGL 3.2 Support Expected to Follow

NEW ORLEANS - AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced planned support for the OpenGL 3D graphics API by committing to OpenGL 3.1 support for ATI FirePro™ 3D graphics accelerators. As a leading environment for developing interactive 3D graphics applications, OpenGL helps foster innovation and speed application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across popular desktop and workstation platforms, which helps to ensure wide application deployment.

“OpenGL 3.1 helps developers to take full advantage of powerful ATI FirePro graphics accelerators that provide performance, stability and visionary innovation for graphics professionals,” said Janet Matsuda, senior director, AMD Professional Graphics. “AMD continues to deliver OpenGL support that in turn enhances CAD, digital content creation and scientific application provider offerings. Further, AMD’s OpenGL extensions, such as tessellation, help developers increase the visual quality of 3D objects and enable the creation of highly realistic looking characters, objects and scenery. We look forward to future enhancements that we expect to be available in OpenGL 3.2 and beyond.”

Earlier this year, AMD released its OpenGL 3.0 drivers and offered innovative OpenGL extensions to help enable improved performance scaling and parallel processing with multiple GPUs and enhanced scene realism through increased geometry detail.

ATI Catalyst™ graphics driver support for ATI FirePro graphics accelerators, including support for OpenGL 3.1, is expected to be available August 12th.

OpenGL 3.2 will be the newest revision of this industry standard and was announced this week at SIGGRAPH 2009. In upcoming ATI Catalyst software releases AMD plans to continue to expand its support for extensions targeted at future versions of OpenGL, including OpenGL 3.2.