Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Adds Experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 For Open-Source Arm Mali

Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver for providing open-source support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs now has experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support.

With Panfrost's OpenGL ES 2.x support maturing well, recently Alyssa Rosenzweig of Collabora and other developers have been tackling OpenGL ES 3.0 support. As of today, that initial OpenGL ES 3.0 code was merged into Mesa 20.1 but isn't yet enabled by default. However, when running Mesa Git it just requires setting the PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gles3 environment variable.

More details on this accomplishment for Panfrost Gallium3D can be found via the Collabora blog. More details on the necessary code changes for bringing up GLES 3 in Panfrost can be found via this Mesa patch series.

At the moment Panfrost has a 95% pass rate for the OpenGL ES 3.0 tests. Games like SuperTuxKart that run well on Arm are already benefiting from this new driver support.