Mesa Slowly Gets Better OpenGL 3 Coverage

While OpenGL 3.0 was announced in August of 2007, nearly three years later its coverage in the open-source Mesa stack is lacking even while the 3.1/3.2/3.3 revisions have been introduced and OpenGL 4.0 was already introduced this year. Slowly but surely though, the open-source developers are making progress in implementing OpenGL 3.x support for Mesa.

There was also supposed to be an OpenGL 3.x state tracker for Mesa "hopefully soon" and now a year has passed since that point with no signs of anything greater than OpenGL 2.1 support arriving. We do know that once OpenGL 3.x support does finally arrive, it will be known as Mesa 8.0.

Last month we reported that Mesa received some OpenGL 3 love and now this month it continues to implement a few more bits of the specification. Brian Paul last night had updated the GL3 status file to reflect that the glBindBufferRange and glBindBufferBase commands for the OpenGL 3.0 support are done after they were not even started on until recently.

Work on the signed normalized texture formats for OpenGL 3.1 has also been started. As can be seen in the GL3 status file more items are being marked as "DONE", but there still are some major areas left to implement -- for instance, none of the required GLSL (GL Shading Language) changes for OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2/3.3/4.0 have been started on yet nor many of the commands introduced in subsequent OpenGL 3.x updates.

While there isn't OpenGL support being worked on this year in Google's X Summer of Code besides ATI R300 GLSL improvements, hopefully this summer we will see Mesa's core and the DRI drivers picking up more OpenGL 3.x support and ideally the emergence of the long-awaited Gallium3D state tracker.