Mesa 10.4 Has Been Branched - No OpenGL 4 This Year

Mesa 10.4 was branched from Git master this weekend and that means the next Mesa release features only OpenGL 3.3 compliance and not OpenGL 4.0~4.2 as many had hoped.

Mesa 10.4 is planned for a December release and this three-month update was planned to be branched this weekend with the plans set out by Emil Velikov, Mesa's new release manager. While Mesa 10.4 has a lot of new features that have piled up over the past quarter for the contained graphics drivers and Gallium3D state trackers, OpenGL 4.0~4.2 compliance was not among the features, though the support is close. Hopefully for the first release of Mesa in 2015 we'll finally see OpenGL 4.0/4.1/4.2 support crossed off the TODO list.

The branch message was posted to Mesa-dev and the plan is to do the Mesa 10.4 Release Candidate 1 on Monday. Stay tuned for more Mesa 10.4 performance tests and feature recaps in the days and weeks ahead.