I'd like to see if Khronos has any news on OpenGL 5 (or 4.4), unless they're specifically playing "catch-up" with DirectX right now (ie, no news until new DirectX gets released).
I guess the problem is this: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/22/week-in-tech-the-end-of-graphics-and-other-stuff/
No point in updating the APIs when the hardware itself isn't bringing much new to the table
Usually the reverse is true. You can check up on the
OpenGL extension registry because typically new graphics functions show up as OpenGL extensions rather early in the process.
The last forty or so of the extensions are not in the current Direct3D in any obvious form. There are also quite a few of the roughly 570 extensions that have never been incorporated into Direct3D but are available to OpenGL developers.
An SDK update will likely include several of the new OpenGL extensions that are now missing in Direct3D, but not all of them.
This problem is the main gripe about Direct3D, and why I have always disliked it.
In the OpenGL world you simply test if a feature is present. If it exists you can use it. You need only wait until the driver supports it. As a programmer you are expected to know what features are fast and modern, and know what features are slow and ancient. You can mix and match old and new, fast and slow. When a new feature comes out you do not need to rewrite your game engine, you can simply enumerate and use the feature if enumeration succeeds. And if you are working with a hardware vendor on a cool new feature you only need to wait for your experimental drivers and not for a new version of the operating system.
Direct3D provides the convenience of a single feature set: If you can create the interface then you get those features, all from the same graphics card era. That is also its fatal flaw. If the feature is not in the feature set you cannot get access to it. If you want to target cards from 2003 but also take advantage of newer features on new cards there is no way to do it on Direct3D. For quite some time many games shipped with dual binaries to handle different versions of Direct3D. This is something OpenGL developers don't encounter.
If you want to know what is coming in the next Direct3D release, look at the features that OpenGL has added over the last two years. Direct3D will include some (but usually not all) of those.
Its like when people panicked about XNA's future.
