Intel's Iris Gallium3D Driver Now Has Better OpenGL Compatibility Profile Support

Intel's modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver has exposed GLSL 4.60 compatibility (the shading language requirements for OpenGL 4.6) but when creating an OpenGL compatibility context it's been at 1.40 for the old OpenGL 3.1 requirements. Fortunately, the compatibility mode now too exposes 4.60 support.

Now when creating a compatibility profile context with the Iris Gallium3D driver, GLSL 460 is there matching what is exposed by the core context rather than from the dated OpenGL 3.1 days.

Valve open-source developer Timothy Arceri made the switch after discovering that all of the Piglit OpenGL regression tests were able to pass now with GLSL 460 enabled in the compatibility mode.

Like the i965 Mesa driver, Iris is exposing OpenGL 4.5 support but OpenGL 4.6 might be just around the corner and perhaps in time for the Mesa 19.2 branching next week.