Igalia Posts Intel vertex_attrib_64bit Mesa Driver Patches, Close To OpenGL 4.1+

While the Intel Mesa driver remains at OpenGL 3.3 due to missing FP64 support, that code continues to be worked on by Igalia and Intel's OTC developers. Patches for a related extension, ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, have also now been published that will clear Intel's Mesa driver requirements for OpenGL 4.1.

Antia Puentes of Igalia published the ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit patches this morning for Intel's Mesa driver and supports Broadwell (Gen 8) hardware and newer. She explained about the timing of the work, "As this work depends on the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 i965 functionality, which is work in progress, the aim of sending the series now is to get early feedback and parallelise the review process."

ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 is the only extension blocking Intel from having OpenGL 4.0 support in their driver while the ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit is the only blocker for OpenGL 4.1. All of the OpenGL 4.2 changes have already been made to the i965 DRI driver.

The current patch series can be found via this Mesa-dev thread. It looks like if Igalia developers can finish up FP64 support soon, the Intel Mesa driver will back to being competitive with the other Mesa/Gallium3D drivers in their OpenGL 4 offering.

Meanwhile, since 2014 the Intel Windows driver has supported OpenGL 4.3 on Haswell and for the past year Intel's OpenGL Windows driver has been doing OpenGL 4.4. When it comes to OpenGL 4.3 for Intel's Mesa driver, they are blocked by just ARB_robust_buffer_access_behavior but for OpenGL 4.4 support there are multiple remaining work items.