OpenGL 4.2新加入的特性支持如下，也可以参考官方新闻稿：

-Enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;

-Capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;

-Modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;

-Packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

同时NVIDIA也随之放出了首款面向开发者的OpenGL 4.2 Windows/Linux驱动，支持Quadro Plex 700/7000/6000/5000/4000/2000/600以及GeForce 500/400全系列显卡。AMD的Beta版驱动预计也将在稍后发布。