Microsoft's Mesa D3D12 Driver Now Allows OpenGL 4.2

In a short period of time Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D driver has gone from implementing OpenGL 3.3 atop the Direct3D 12 interface to now having working OpenGL 4.2 support.

It's been fast pace recently for Microsoft's D3D12 code within Mesa. Among the recent work touching D3D12 in Mesa has been tessellation support as one of the necessary prerequisites to OpenGL 4.0 plus there was also the landing of compute shaders, among other GL 4.x items. The recent OpenGL 4.x push follows recently wrapping up OpenGL ES 3.1 work. Beyond the OpenGL space, there is also "Dozen" maturing for Vulkan over D3D12.

Now with Mesa's mainline code as of today for next quarter's Mesa 21.1, OpenGL 4.2 is exposed atop this driver that in turn will run atop Windows' Direct3D 12 drivers whether it be for lack of native OpenGL drivers or if running by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Microsoft's Jesse Natalie noted in the merge that it will likely be the last version bump for some time. Implementing OpenGL 4.3 on D3D12 requires "new D3D12 features (which are now in development)" so that first must happen and have driver support before OpenGL 4.3+ can be exposed.