Status
Brook has been in beta for a long time. The last major beta release (v0.4) was in October 2004 but renewed development began and stopped again in November 2007 with a v0.5 beta 1 release.
The new features of v0.5 include a much upgraded and faster OpenGL backend which uses framebuffer objects instead of PBuffers and harmonised the code around standard OpenGL interfaces instead of using proprietary vendor extensions. GLSL support was added which brings all the functionality (complex branching and loops) previously only supported by DirectX 9 to OpenGL. In particular, this means that Brook is now just as capable on Linux as Windows.
Other improvements in the v0.5 series include multi-backend usage whereby different threads can run different Brook programs concurrently (this allows a multi-GPU setup to be maxed out) and SSE and OpenMP support for the CPU backend (this allows near maximal usage of modern CPUs).
Later versions might include Brook+, a version supporting integer and double precision processing for AMD GPUs, possibly with scatter support.
Read more about this topic: Brook GPU
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—Terri Apter (20th century)