Intel's Mesa Driver Appears Ready For OpenGL 4.5

It looks like Intel's Mesa open-source Linux graphics driver may be done with OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5, assuming you are using Broadwell hardware or newer.

This evening in Mesa Git the final ARB_enhanced_layouts extension work landed, which was the final extension blocking the Intel i965 Mesa driver from OpenGL 4.4 support and was already cleared with its OpenGL 4.5 extension requirements.

So with ARB_enhanced_layouts marked done, up through OpenGL 4.5 there are no longer any extensions not marked as "DONE" for Intel, at least when referring to Intel Broadwell/Skylake support and newer!

I haven't yet fired up Mesa Git this evening to see whether OpenGL 4.5 is actually advertised or whether there are still some corner-cases to address or some trivial checks added with this being the first Mesa driver reaching OpenGL 4.5 compliance, but anything else should come to light soon enough. The Nouveau NVC0 and AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers are currently at OpenGL 4.3 but not too far behind with OpenGL 4.4/4.5. Hopefully we'll see these NVIDIA and Radeon drivers reach OpenGL 4.5 in time for the next Mesa release in September. Intel is also closing in on OpenGL ES 3.2 support for their Mesa driver while the other hardware drivers still have more headway to make in their GLES 3.2 implementations.

Update: The latest Mesa Git code now enables OpenGL 4.4 for the i965 driver with Broadwell (Gen 8) and newer, but no word on flipping the GL 4.5 switch yet.