OpenGL 4.6 Released With Vulkan/SPIR-V Ingestion, Parallel Shader Compiles & Finally AF

[Michael]

Do we know minimum hardware specs on which it will be implemented? Everything that still has official driver support? Nvidia seems to have the beta driver for Fermi and newer.

Anything with OpenGL 4.5 hardware support can do GL 4.6.

[VikingGe]

Can't they built OpenGL atop vulkan and focus on vulkan instead?

Vulkan has more relaxed requirements than OpenGL in some ways (e.g. painting two otherwise identical triangles in two different locations must produce the same result for both triangles in OpenGL, but not in Vulkan), but even ignoring such edge cases, it would probably be a nightmare. Vulkan expects you to tell the driver what exactly you're going to do with what resource in advance, OpenGL just lets you use stuff.

D3D11 might actually be easier in that regard, but has other issues - you'd need to re-implement parts of DXGI as well, and both legacy APIs have resource binding models that do not map well at all to Vulkan's descriptor sets.

I'm kind of curious how exactly Gallium works, though. Is there any decent documentation available for that?

[smitty3268]

what is the point of OGL releases now? Can't they built OpenGL atop vulkan and focus on vulkan instead?

What's the point of repaving that road? Can't they just rip it all out and put in a subway for people to use instead?

[eydee]

Anything with OpenGL 4.5 hardware support can do GL 4.6.

Can do and will do are a very different thing, especially in AMD world.

[Creak]

Indeed didn't take long, patch is now on the mailing list: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ly/164799.html

Anyway, interesting that shader_group_vote is there, but not shader_ballot. The int64 dependency got in the way? Well, at least that means there's a high chance Haswell will get full 4.6 support

Haha, that's going to be interesting to see how my script handles the new OpenGL version 😀
But I'll keep my eyes peeled, and fix any problem as fast as possible.

Thanks!

[pal666]

Can't they built OpenGL atop vulkan

no...

[Guy1524]

no...

Why not, Vulkan is lower level so in theory it should be possible to do it

[Creak]

Why not, Vulkan is lower level so in theory it should be possible to do it

In theory, but is it worth the cost of possibly break all the existing OpenGL drivers? (It's not sure the OpenGL over Vulkan will behave exactly the same as pure OpenGL)

[pal666]

Why not, Vulkan is lower level so in theory it should be possible to do it

it is possible but slow. vulkan driver has contracts with application which opengl driver hasn't

[MrCooper]

I'm kind of curious how exactly Gallium works, though. Is there any decent documentation available for that?

There is https://gallium.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ .