[astrange]

> From my understanding, the Khronos group realized OpenCL 2.x was much too complicated so vendors just weren’t implementing it, or only implementing parts of it, so they came up with OpenCL 3.0 which is slimmed-down and much more modular.

Something like this also happened to OpenGL 4.3. It added a compute shader extension which was essentially all of OpenCL again, except different, so you had 2x the implementation work. This is about when some people stopped implementing OpenGL.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

OpenGL compute shaders are a natural step if you have unified programmable shader cores, and less complicated than adding new pipeline stages for everything (tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, …).

Khronos could have chosen only to add OpenCL integration, but OpenCL C is a very different language to GLSL, the memory model (among other things) is different, and so on. I don't see why video game developers should be forced to use OpenCL when they want to work with the outputs of OpenGL rendering passes, to produce inputs to OpenGL rendering passes, scheduled in OpenGL, to do things that don't fit neatly into vertex or fragment shaders?

[pjmlp]

On the contrary, for example on Android OpenGL ES you get compute shaders, but no OpenCL.

By the way, the latest version is OpenGL 4.6, it is also available on the Switch.