Intel's Gallium3D Linux Driver Now Exposes OpenGL 4.6

Just a few weeks after Intel's i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa added GL 4.6 support, the "Iris" Gallium3D driver is now exposing OpenGL 4.6 support too.

But unlike the i965 driver with OpenGL 4.6 support back-ported to Mesa 19.2, for the Intel Gallium3D driver it isn't marked for back-porting so is likely a feature for next quarter's Mesa 19.3 with that being the version in development on Git master. The Intel Gallium3D support comes after all the heavy-lifting done for getting the SPIR-V extensions in place for the common Intel graphics code over the past two years. This Intel Gallium3D driver is now the second in Mesa supporting GL 4.6 and the first Gallium3D driver to do so.

On Tuesday following the infrastructure changes, Intel's Gallium3D driver went ahead and enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions as the two final extensions for this modern Intel OpenGL driver to advertise GL 4.6.

Making things more exciting is that for Mesa 19.3 is the planned point where Intel has talked of changing over the default Linux OpenGL driver from i965 to Iris. Mesa 19.3.0 should be released around early December.