Intel Mesa Driver Getting Better Support For ETC2 On Older Hardware

For those running Ivybridge/Haswell era Intel graphics and older, better support for ETC2 texture compression is on the way.

Eleni Maria Stea of Igalia has been working on patches to improve the ETC2 format support for these "Gen 7" era graphics and older as they lack native ETC2 coverage. Following these improvements to better fake the ETC2 support, OES_copy_image support is now enabled for Gen 7 era graphics hardware.

ETC2 is the lossy texture compression algorithm mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3. ETC2 isn't as widely adopted yet as S3TC, but at least it continues improving and covering more ground.

The pending patches improving the ETC2 support for the Intel i965 Mesa driver can be found on Mesa-dev for what will likely be merged into the newly-opened 19.1 cycle.