Gallium3D Feature Levels Plotted, Discussed

The last time we talked about Gallium3D work being done by Zack Rusin was just before the holidays when he was hacking on new geometry shader support. Zack's latest work on Gallium3D though is for defining "feature levels" that provides a table for what features can be supported by a given driver / graphics processor.

The Gallium3D feature levels pair closely to DirectX version numbers and their capabilities, such as with regard to the availability of fragment shaders, vertex shaders, maximum texture dimensions, two-sided stencil, and other technical features. These seven Gallium3D feature levels also state which support OpenCL 1.0, OpenGL 4.0/3.2/3.0, etc. Beyond just defining these levels, Zack has also added a parameter to the Gallium3D infrastructure so that drivers can expose which feature level they support.

This work and the resulting discussion can be found in this Mesa mailing list thread.