You can find information on the OpenGL version and GPU of your device under the menu item device capabilites. If you’re not sure about the capabilities of your device just go the settings menu of Shaderific. This is done by adding the following compiler directive at the beginning of the files: #version 300 esĭoing so on a device that does not support OpenGL ES 3.0 does result in the compile error: version '300' is not supported in line ?Ī shader without the compiler directive is treated as targeting OpenGL ES 2.0 / GLSL 1.00. The first thing you need to do is to enable the new shading language version in both shader files. This example should help you to update your existing shaders and start to include new OpenGL ES 3.0 specific functionality. You can see a short video demonstrating the shader at YouTube and the shader program can be downloaded here. It is based on the head shader included in Shaderific.

The following is a tutorial that shows you how to update a simple shader that uses a 2D texture lookup from OpenGL ES 2.0 / GLSL 1.00 to OpenGL ES 3.0 / GLSL 3.00. For a quick overview of all (new) language constructs you can take a look at the OpenGL ES 3.0 Reference Card and compare it to the OpenGL ES 2.0 Reference Card.

The update of the language includes among other things new language constructs that give you access to the new features of OpenGL ES 3.0 (e.g., 3D textures) but it also makes changes to already existing features (e.g., the lookup function for a texture2D). To use the new features provided by OpenGL ES 3.0 you need to use the new OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL 3.00) in your shader. OpenGL ES 3.0 is fully backward compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0 which means that all your shaders targeted at OpenGL ES 2.0 keep running just fine. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that only the aforementioned devices are capable of OpenGL ES 3.0 and not all devices that run iOS 7.

So if you want to target OpenGL ES 3.0 there are already a lot of new devices out there that do support it. With the release of iOS 7 and the introduction of the iPad Air, the iPad mini with retina display and the iPhone 5S Apple has brought OpenGL ES 3.0 to their mobile devices.

Opengl es 2.0