Freedreno 3D Driver Hits Rendering Milestone

While not as far along as the ARM Lima driver or even OpenFIMG, the open-source reverse-engineered "Freedreno" driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon graphics hardware has hit a rendering milestone. There's also a small ARM Mali driver update.

Rob Clark, the Texas Instruments developer who is working on this new driver in his spare time after an interesting launch, is back to making some interesting progress.

Rob has the first successful renders on Freedreno in conjunction with his FDRE library. This isn't a glxgears (well, eglgears) milestone or anything too exciting in the 3D space, but he's basically to rendering a quad-flat, triangle-quad, and a triangle-smoothed. This is similar to where the reverse-engineered ARM Mali driver was back in February in Brussels.

What the Freedreno driver can now render... Not quite Counter-Strike: Source, yet.

Rob wrote about the "first renders" milestone on his blog. The Freedreno code is housed on Gitorious.org.

Luc Verhaegen showing off Lima driver progress last month over beers in Franconia.

Over in Codethink's Lima driver camp for open-source ARM Mali enablement, there's a small update too. The developers have been able to get a test application running that's only executing code that was assembled by them, i.e. not using ARM's commercial shader compiler or other non-open tools. However, the Lima driver still doesn't have its own shader compiler for this young open-source ARM graphics driver.