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To coincide with the Khronos release of OpenGL 4.2, NVIDIA has drivers available now for Windows and Linux. These drivers provide full support for OpenGL 4.2 and GLSL 4.20. Developers can immediatly start to experiment with the new features and performance enhancements of OpenGL 4.2.

OpenGL 4.2 provides the following new functionality:

ARB_shader_atomic_counters GLSL built-in functions to query and increment/decrement atomic counters Counters stored in buffer objects ARB_shader_image_load_store Allow shaders to load from, store to, and perform atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture ARB_texture_storage ARB_transform_feedback_instanced Draw multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback Without query and sync needed for DrawArraysInstanced() ARB_shading_language_420pack Collection of new GLSL features ARB_texture_compression_BPTC ARB extension since January 2010, promoted to core now Same formats as BC6H/BC7 in DirectX 11 ARB_base_instance Specify offset within buffer object for instanced drawing Adds three new API calls ARB_internalformat_query Enumerate the supported number of samples per internal format OpenGL 4.2 provides the following new performance improvements:

ARB_compressed_texture_pixel_storage Modify an arbitrary subset of compressed texture Blizzard requested feature ARB_shading_language_packing Allows GLSL shaders to read and write 16-bit floating-point encodings Pack small data types into one larger one Implementable on pre GL 4 hardware Uniform sampler initialization and Uniform block binding initialization Use layout to set texture image unit, and UBO index No need to call GetUniformLocation() or GetUniformBlockLocation() Part of ARB_shading_language_420pack ARB_map_buffer_alignment Pointer returned is aligned for SSE/AVX CPU instructions ARB_conservative_depth Shader constructs that help enable depth testing before fragment processing