Icare3D

Awesome !

An awesome post from Christophe Riccio about his speculation for next OpenGL releases:
http://www.g-truc.net/post-tech-lastest-full.html#post0330

Here is the summary:

Available to registered developers.

Here are the interesting new stuff I found:

• Support for malloc() and free() in kernels: dynamic global memory allocation !
This is implemented with a new syscall linking mechanism that seems to allow kernel to be linked to precompiled system calls. Infos on the linking mechanism (.calltargets , .callprototype ) can be found in section 10.3 of the PTX ISA manual. I hope this mechanism will get exposed for user functions in the API !

• 64 bits addressing support in CUDA driver AP: Allows manipulating more than 4GB of device memory.

• New System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) for reporting various hardware counters informations

• New stream synchronization function cudaStreamSynchronize(): allow GPU-side inter-streams synchronisation.

• A set of new calls is available to allow the creation of CUDA devices with interoperability with Direct3D devices that use SLI in AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) 
• New flag to driver API texture reference (CU_TRSF_SRGB), which enables sRGB->linear conversion on a read.

• Reference manual adds architecture information on GF10x (GF104, GF106, GF108) class hardware (compute capability 2.1)

• Add tld4 (fetch4) instruction for loading a component (r, g, b, or a) from the four texels compising the bilinear interpolation footprint of a given texture location.

• Add kernel pointer parameter state space and alignment of the memory being pointed to.

• CUSPARSE, supporting sparse matrix computations.

• CURAND, supporting random number generation for both host and device code with Sobel quasi-random and XORWOW pseudo random routines.