The Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Begins Rendering On Arm Bifrost Hardware

With the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver having its Arm Midgard graphics support in order, the developers involved have begun working more on the newer Bifrost architecture.

Mali Bifrost GPUs have been around for two years now and already succeeded by Valhall as the latest Mali architecture. Bifrost is found in the likes of the Samsung Exynos 7885/8895, Rockchip RK3326, AmLogic S922X, Kirin 970/980/990, and numerous other SoCs.

The Gallium3D driver in Mesa 20.1-devel has the first 3D renders now working on Bifrost including basic texture support.

There are many architectural changes from Midgard to Bifrost and thus still a lot more work ahead before it's up to achieving OpenGL ES 3.0 as well as operating at peak performance.

Bifrost is capable of Vulkan 1.1 but at this point the only Panfrost driver project work has been focused on OpenGL (GLES).

More details on the very early Bifrost rendering work via this blog post.