Mesa Support For OpenGL Geometry Shaders

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 27 July 2012 at 12:18 PM EDT. 7 Comments
MESA
An exciting message hit the Mesa mailing list on Friday morning concerning support for OpenGL geometry shaders.

Zack Rusin has done some work previously on supporting OpenGL geometry shaders within Mesa/Gallium3D, and now Bryan Cain has been building upon this code to support the ARB_geometry_shader4 and EXT_geometry_shader4 extensions. OpenGL geometry shaders are one of the big features to the OpenGL 3.2 core specification. Geometry shaders control primitive processing and can generate new primitives; this post vertex shader process was added to the OpenGL 3.2 core but has been around earlier through extensions.

In Cain's GitHub geometry-shaders branch since yesterday he now has all the GLSL demos that utilize the geometry shader extensions working fully. However, right now it's only working with the Mesa Softpipe driver and not any of the actual Mesa/Gallium3D hardware drivers. There's also some other work he says that should be completed prior to this being merged to master, so it might not make the cut for next month's Mesa 8.1 release.

The hopeful Mesa geometry shader mailing list message can be viewed from the archives.

More information on OpenGL geometry shaders is available from the OpenGL.org registry.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week