Nouveau Gallium3D Now Supports OpenGL 3.2, 3.3

With a fresh round of Mesa Git commits on Monday morning the support landed for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 within Nouveau's NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers.

Nouveau Gallium3D was at OpenGL 3.1 compliance for its NV50 driver (the GeForce 8 through GeForce 300 series) and NVC0 (the GeForce 400 and newer; Fermi and Kepler) driver, but now GL 3.2 and 3.3 compliance has been reached in Mesa. This milestone comes months after Intel reached OpenGL 3.3 support for Intel Ivy Bridge and newer after doing all of the heavy-lifting within core Mesa. Last week was when patches emerged for the AMD LLVM GPU back-end and Mesa for RadeonSI OpenGL 3.3 support. This last of the GL3 enablement is now followed by Nouveau for GeForce 8 hardware and newer.

This Nouveau work was done largely by Ilia Mirkin along with work by Bryan Cain and others that did ongoing improvements to Mesa. The changes today involved adding Nouveau Geometry Shaders support, other changes to advertise GLSL 1.50 support, and then lastly was the GL3 documentation update to reflect that the NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers have OpenGL 3.2 and 3.3 support finished.

All of these Nouveau changes will be part of the upcoming Mesa 10.1 release, but too bad that many Nouveau bugs and regressions remain. See this weekend's open-source driver GPU comparison if you're interested in see how the Nouveau driver is running these days on a diverse range of hardware.