Finding Out The OpenGL Core Profile Version

With this morning's release of mesa-demos 8.1, which provides updates to the commonly used glxinfo command, it's now easy to find out the version of the OpenGL Core Profile supported by your graphics driver/hardware.

David Airlie announced the release on the mesa-dev list. "New release of mesa demos repo (8.1.0). I'm mainly releasing this to pick up the newer glxinfo changes for core profiles. But apparantly we haven't released in ages so the log is below!"

Aside from the glxinfo changes for OpenGL Core Profiles there is Wayland support within eglut, various updates to the OpenGL tests/demos, glxgears now supports multi-sample visuals, new EGL/OpenVG tests, build updates, and dozens of other changes. This is the first update to Mesa Demos since version 8.0.1 three years ago, so there's a lot of updates to this collection of tests/demos/utilities for Mesa.

The most notable change is glxinfo: add support for creating/querying core-profile contexts (v3.1). Contrary to the commit message though, the -c flag for the glxinfo command isn't needed for creating/querying the Core Profile contexts. Simply when running glxinfo, new lines are displayed for the OpenGL core profile shading language version string and OpenGL core profile version string.

When reading these new versions, you can now see the versions of OpenGL and GLSL your Mesa/Gallium3D drivers truly support. Up to now glxinfo wouldn't display OpenGL information above version 3.0 in the compatibility mode, but now there's this core profile support.

The Phoronix Test Suite Git has already been updated to take advantage of the OpenGL core profile information where available.