Khronos Group, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL 2D and 3D graphics standard, said this week that it released OpenGL 3.2, the latest update that the group said improves upon important aspects of the API.

Khronos said OpenGL 3.2 adds features for "enhanced performance, increased visual quality, accelerated geometry processing and easier portability of Direct3D applications". The full specification is available to download at the official OpenGL website.

Some of the new capabilities of OpenGL 3.2 are, as listed by Khronos:

-Increased performance for vertex arrays and fence sync objects to avoid idling while waiting for resources shared between the CPU and GPU, or multiple CPU threads;
- Improved pipeline programmability, including geometry shaders in the OpenGL core;
- Boosted cube map visual quality and multisampling rendering flexibility by enabling shaders to directly process texture samples.

OpenGL 3.2 is the third "major" OpenGL release in 12 months, Khronos said. The group claimed that the installed base for OpenGL-compatible GPUs is over 150 million units.

Khronos is also behind other standard specs, such as OpenCL for parallel compute, OpenGL ES for mobile 3D graphics, and WebGL.