LLVMpipe Effectively At OpenGL 4.6 With Anistropic Filtering Now Supported

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver in Gallium3D as well as the Lavapipe Vulkan software implementation now have anisotropic texture filtering support with Mesa 21.3 development code.

David Airlie of Red Hat has been working on the anisotropic filtering support on and off the past half-year. As of yesterday, the code was merged and is based on code originally written for the slower Softpipe OpenGL driver code.

David Airlie went on to note on his Blogspot that in the process he also discovered and fixed an AF quality issue with Softpipe that dates back five years. One borked line of code during a code refactoring led to poor quality anisotropic filtering for Softpipe and initially carried over to this new implementation but now addressed.

Making this anisotropic filtering for LLVMpipe all the more important is that it was the latest extension preventing LLVMpipe from advertising OpenGL 4.6. Now that ARB_texture_filter_anisotropic is exposed, LLVMpipe is effectively at the OpenGL 4.6 milestone. Airlie notes though that there still are some fixes elsewhere in the driver still needing to land before it will be formally in compliance with this latest OpenGL revision.