It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry.

It was surprising enough when earlier this month OpenGL mesh shader support was merged with the cross-vendor GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension. That extension was requested by the Nvidium project as a rendering engine for Sodium with Minecraft in wanting a cross-vendor mesh shader extension rather than just GL_NV_mesh_shader for NVIDIA's implementation.

Now this week more OpenGL extensions have been merged into the registry and other notable updates.

GL_EXT_shader_realtime_clock was added by a Collabora developer for the GLSL support merged earlier this year for a real-time counter that can be used to derive timing information within a shader in building off the GL_ARB_shader_clock work.

Also merged was GL_EXT_shader_texture_samples from Google. This provides GLSL built-in functions allowing shaders to query the number of samples of a texture.

There have also been other updates this week such as adding desktop OpenGL core support to most GL_EXT_texture_sRGB formats. Plus adding desktop OpenGL support for the GL_EXT_fragment_shading_rate extension. Previously GL_EXT_fragment_shading_rate was only exposed for OpenGL ES 2.

Certainly it's been interesting activity in the OpenGL Registry this month.