R600 Gallium3D Driver Lands Tesselation Support In Time For Mesa 20.1

One of the many new features coming in Mesa 20.1 is experimental NIR support for the vintage Radeon "R600g" driver. That NIR back-end isn't yet to feature parity but is now one step closer with tessellation support now being available along this code path.

With Mesa 20.1 branching this week, there's a surge in last minute driver activity for Mesa Git. One of the last minute changes was merging R600 NIR tessellation support.

Similar to the TGSI code path for R600g, the tessellation support with NIR is on AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware and not the HD 2000/3000/4000 generations also supported by this open-source Gallium3D driver.

The Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards will struggle to run many modern Linux games especially with most newer titles being Vulkan-only, but at least this continued work on the NIR front should help various vintage gamers. This R600g NIR support continues to be pursued by community developer Gert Wollny.