Is there any possibility that the Raspberry Pi will support OpenGL ES 3 at some point? What about different OpenGL ES 2 extensions? Is the current feature set the best the hardware can do, or is there still some potential for improvement?
In particular, I've tried implementing the type of "ray casting" approach as described in this blog post: http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2011/ ... engl-es-20.
Unfortunately, OpenGL ES 2 does not support either writing to gl_FragDepth or using the GL_MIN blend equation. There are extensions to OpenGL ES 2 for both, and OpenGL ES 3 includes both options "natively", but the pi currently supports none of this (as far as I can tell). This effectively makes it impossible to use this kind of rendering technique (which is a shame, because it leads to stunning visual quality, and often at higher framerates than when using insane amounts of triangles).
(Of course, if anyone knows of an efficient way to work around these limitations, that's also a welcome answer, but I highly doubt it. The only method I've seen is basically implementing blending in a shader, but that's not really an option here, as you have a huge number of objects that all have to be blended over one another.)