Khronos announced version 3.2 of its OpenGL graphics programming interface now available online. The update provides enhancements in graphics performance and visual quality and adds support for geometry shaders.

A broad group of companies in desktop and mobile graphics are members of Khronos. The group claims as many as 150 million processors now support its OpenGL programming interface.

"OpenGL is truly the foundation on which rich graphics for mobile devices and the Web is being built," said Jon Peddie, principal of Jon Peddie Research (Tiburon, Calif.).

Members including rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia were quick to support the enhancements, the third upgrade of the OpenGL spec this year.

"Producing three new versions of the specification in twelve months is a remarkable achievement," said Janet Matsuda, senior director of professional graphics at AMD.

Nvidia released OpenGL 3.2 beta drivers the same day the new spec was published. It also has an executive leading the Architecture Review Board at Khronos which is developing extensions for future APIs.

"We are listening carefully to developer feedback and will continue to rapidly evolve OpenGL to meet the needs of the industry," said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group and OpenGL engineering manager at Nvidia.

For its part, Intel rolled out a Media Software Development Kit at Siggraph to boost hardware acceleration on its graphics products including the future Larrabee, its first parallel graphics processor. The tool includes an API for enhancing video playback and encoding.

Intel also hosted at Siggraph four sessions for graphics developers including two specifically on Larrabee. The sessions covered some of the new instructions used in the processor.

For its part, Nvidia rolled out four new software capabilities for its graphics chips, including a real-time ray-tracing application called Optix. The app has a broad range of uses in fields ranging from car and acoustical design to radiation research.

Analyst Peddie called Optix "a phenomenal milestone for developers and designers alike. Intricate design tasks, such as examining the play of reflection and refraction across surfaces and within glass, can now be examined in real-time," he added in an Nvidia statement.

Nvidia released three other apps including Complex which is used for managing applications across multiple GPUs, and tools for optimizing 3-D graphics effects.

Two of the new apps are now available online. Examples of a pre-release version of Optix are available online and a final release is expected in the fall.