Intel Will Be Turning NIR On By Default In Their Mesa Driver

NIR is the new IR for Mesa designed to be better than GLSL IR that's been in development for many months and was started by a high schooler (now college student).
NIR has been in Mesa since January and has seen a lot of improvements by Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers. While it's been part of mainline Mesa for months, it's been disabled by default and hidden behind the INTEL_USE_NIR environment variable.
Jason Ekstrand of Intel made a commit yesterday improving the INTEL_USE_NIR environment variable handling. What's interesting about it though is the commit message that confirms the plans Intel is indeed going to be enabling NIR by default in the near future for their Mesa OpenGL driver. "In preparation for turning NIR on by default, this commit makes it smarter by allowing the INTEL_USE_NIR variable to work as either a force-enable or a force-disable," Ekstrand noted.
Other drivers like the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver have also expressed interest in NIR but this default change is just to affect the Intel DRI driver.
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