Mesa 19.2 Is Just Six Patches Away From Seeing OpenGL 4.6 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 19.2 Is Just Six Patches Away From Seeing OpenGL 4.6 Support

Later this month marks two years since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and just ahead of that date it looks like Mesa could finally land its complete GL 4.6 implementation, at least as far as the Intel open-source graphics driver support is concerned...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Nears-OpenGL-4.6

[treba]

What does that mean exactly? Can applications then load spirv shaders instead of glsl, requiering less shader compilation? If so, does that allow for quicker application load times?

[microcode]

What does that mean exactly? Can applications then load spirv shaders instead of glsl, requiering less shader compilation? If so, does that allow for quicker application load times?

Yeah, basically; it also means that if the publisher of the software is feeling lucky, they'll ship only SPIR-V shaders for both a Vulkan and a GL renderer; though it seems to me that platforms with working OpenGL 4.6 drivers will tend to have working Vulkan drivers as well. Maybe it was intended as a transitional feature, to allow people to start using SPIR-V toolchains before implementing a Vulkan renderer.

[FireBurn]

I'm curious to know what took so long - the code Igalia wrote was certified on launch day I believe

[dungeon]

Traditionaly Mesa was always lagging years with GL versions and much more than 2. From that POV 2 years sounds much faster than expected

And reasons was always - not much apps used it anyway, so who cares as it is not a biggie

[Kayden]

I'm curious to know what took so long - the code Igalia wrote was certified on launch day I believe

Piles and piles more testing (in Piglit) and discovering/fixing broken pieces. It ultimately involved rewriting a good portion of the linker, too.

[skeevy420]

Michael, I'm not normally one to give suggestions like this, but you should add "For Intel GPUs" at the end of that headline. I became really then really as an AMD user.

[schmidtbag]

Michael, I'm not normally one to give suggestions like this, but you should add "For Intel GPUs" at the end of that headline. I became really then really as an AMD user.

Don't get too , because in a lot of cases, when one brand adds something to Mesa, it's not uncommon for the other to follow shortly after. Being open-source, I'm sure AMD could mooch off of most of the existing code. Besides... not like there's a lot cases where we're all waiting for 4.6 anyway. I personally don't know of anything that depends on it.

[Terrablit]

It's a pretty big milestone. I've been following this stuff on Mesamatrix back when those drivers were in the early OGL 4 stages. It's great seeing how much green there is on there now. And it's great knowing that we've almost completely caught up on one standard. The mesa team and everyone else in the graphics stack have done an outstanding job.

[skeevy420]

Don't get too , because in a lot of cases, when one brand adds something to Mesa, it's not uncommon for the other to follow shortly after. Being open-source, I'm sure AMD could mooch off of most of the existing code. Besides... not like there's a lot cases where we're all waiting for 4.6 anyway. I personally don't know of anything that depends on it.

I know. Still, it's a bit of a let-down when you read the fine print.