It’s finally available! Version 4.0 of our Triton Ocean SDK is now available for download. Licensed users with an up-to-date support plan can get the latest release from our licensed user download portal, and everyone else can grab a free evaluation SDK to check it out.

The big push for 4.0 was making Triton VR-friendly, by offering real support for multi-threaded rendering. There are many different techniques for multi-threaded rendering out there, and we’ve tried to support as many as we could. Read this article to learn more about using Triton in multi-threaded environments. You’ll find new sample apps in the SDK illustrating how to do this in OpenGL and in DirectX 11.

We’ve also finalized support for bindless graphics in OpenGL 4.5, including bindless textures, bindless UBO’s, and bindless VBO’s. This is sort of bleeding-edge stuff that requires OpenGL 4.5 or newer in addition to some NVidia-specific drivers, so it’s not enabled by default. Read up on the details of how to use it.

In short, we’ve done a ton of work to modernize Triton’s approach to rendering in order to take full advantage of today’s hardware. All of this re-architecture gives Triton much of the same performance benefits offered by Vulkan, but without requiring you to rewrite your entire application! We’ve carefully followed NVidia’s advice in “OpenGL Like Vulkan” to ensure Triton is aligned with where OpenGL, Vulkan, and DirectX 12 are headed in the future.

At Sundog Software, we typically do lots of incremental releases, and version 4.0 is no exception – the architectural changes behind it have actually been getting rolled out slowly throughout Triton’s 3.x run. Triton 4 remains backward compatible with Triton 3 API’s, so you can update now without changing your integration code, and consider taking advantage of its new capabilities later on if you wish.

There are a few other big recent changes worth noting:

  • Our sample applications are now 64-bit only. While Triton itself still offers 32-bit libraries and DLL’s, our sample apps now only support 64-bit targets on Windows.
  • We deprecated Visual Studio 2003, 2005, and 2008 in a previous release.
  • Triton now uses NVidia’s CUDA Toolkit 9.1 for 64-bit targets; if you are building Triton from source, you’ll need to read this article to understand the changes needed to your build environment.

As always, full release notes are available too.

If you run into any trouble, please let us know. And thanks for using Triton!