Khronos Group Announces the On Time Delivery of the OpenGL ES 1.1 Specification, Available for Free Download

LOS ANGELES--Aug. 9, 2004--The Khronos Group:

-- Second version of industry standard for embedded 3D graphics enables new-generation, low-power hardware accelerators;

-- Khronos will update the OpenGL ES Adopter's Program to provide conformance tests for OpenGL ES 1.1

The Khronos(TM) Group announced today that it has unanimously ratified and publicly released the OpenGL(R) ES 1.1 and EGL 1.1 specifications, meeting the Khronos Group's commitment to provide an update to the industry-leading application programming interface (API) for embedded 3D graphics, precisely one year after its initial release. The OpenGL ES standard is royalty-free and defines subset profiles of OpenGL(R) to enable small-footprint embedded applications with advanced graphics capabilities and has been widely adopted by the wireless and gaming industries. OpenGL ES 1.1 adds timely functionality to encourage and enable the new functionality of new-generation embedded platforms with 3D hardware acceleration; including cell-phones. The OpenGL ES 1.1 and EGL 1.1 specifications are available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/spec.html for any third party to implement in products with no licensing restrictions or royalties.

The OpenGL ES 1.1 specification has been developed by many industry-leading companies that are members of Khronos. OpenGL ES 1.1 emphasizes hardware acceleration of the API -- while OpenGL ES 1.0 focused heavily on enabling software-only implementations. Khronos expects both OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 to be widely used across the full range of platforms in the embedded industry and OpenGL ES 1.1 is fully backwards compatible with 1.0 -- enabling easy porting of applications between the two versions of the API. The companion specification to OpenGL ES, EGL 1.1, standardizes how OpenGL ES may be integrated into a wide diversity of operating systems.

"The consolidating force in PC games was OpenGL, and history will repeat itself with the introduction of OpenGL ES for handheld devices," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "The Khronos Group is a leader in building markets for media engines with open standards, and their work will help enable the market to grow to a billion dollars."

"Khronos is executing on its stated goal of updating OpenGL ES annually to keep pace with and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs. "The OpenGL ES Working Group is now working on OpenGL ES 2.0 -- to bring the programmable power of the OpenGL Shading Language to embedded devices in 2005 -- just one year after it was ratified for the desktop."

OpenGL ES 1.1 has new features that provide enhanced functionality, improved image quality and optimizations to increase performance while reducing memory bandwidth usage to save power:

-- Buffer objects; to enable efficient caching of geometry data in graphics memory

-- Enhanced texture processing; including a minimum of two multi-textures and texture combiner functionality for effects such as bump-mapping and per-pixel lighting

-- Vertex skinning functionality; to smoothly animate complex figures and geometries

-- User clip plane; for efficient early culling of non-visible polygons, increasing performance and saving power

-- Enhanced point sprites; for efficient and realistic particle effects

-- Dynamic state queries; enabling OpenGL ES to be used in a sophisticated, layered software environment

-- Draw Texture; for efficient sprites, bitmapped fonts and 2D framing elements in games

Khronos expects to update the OpenGL ES Adopter's Program to provide conformance tests for OpenGL ES 1.1 within three months, enabling interested companies to join Khronos for a small administrative fee to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and example implementations, and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure. This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.

"Imagination Technologies is delighted to renew its commitment as a Promoter of the Khronos Group," said John Metcalfe, VP Business Development (PowerVR), Imagination Technologies. "PowerVR MBX already fully supports OpenGL ES 1.0, and will add OpenGL ES 1.1 support this Q304. We look forward to our continued participation in the evolution of the OpenGL ES specification. Products already announced using PowerVR MBX include Intel's 2700G, Renesas' SH-Mobile3 and SH7770 and TI's OMAP2. The first MBX enabled products are already shipping as of August 2004, and consumer products will be available from this fall."

"Nokia is proud to unveil 3D graphics APIs for Java and C++ for the leading smart phone platform, Series 60 running on Symbian OS. The Nokia 6630 smartphone will be the first mobile device on the market to be fully conformant with both OpenGL ES 1.0 Common Profile and M3G (Mobile 3D Graphics API for Java) specifications," said Kari Pulli, Research Fellow at Nokia. "We are committed to support the charter of the Khronos Group to create open standard, royalty-free APIs across all platforms and devices; and Nokia has renewed its membership for the third year."

"The Bitboys G30 graphics processor is not only compatible, but also compliant with the OpenGL ES 1.0 standard. We are very happy to see the evolution of this important industry standard, and we will provide support for OpenGL ES 1.1 across our entire 3D graphics processor product line immediately," said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys.

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to a very focused series of BOFS "Birds of a Feather" sessions at Siggraph on Wednesday, August 11th at the Hyatt and Hilton Hotels; spanning across a day of learning starting with a 9:00 am keynote by Jon Peddie and Overview by Neil Trevett, through a series of hour long sessions for each of the four APIs: OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenML, and finally the public launch of OpenGL ES 1.1 at the OpenGL ES BOF at 3:30pm -- details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#siggraph04.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX(TM), OpenML(TM) and OpenVG(TM), to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos, OpenVG and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.