R600 Gallium3D Gets A Little Bit Of Attention

With the upcoming Mesa 11.0 release there is OpenGL 4.1 support on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, but no OpenGL 4.0/4.1 support for the R600g driver, which was disappointing to some R600g users within our forums.

The Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics processors are capable of supporting up to OpenGL 4.4, but the R600g driver doesn't receive as much attention as it once did -- similar to R300g taking a backseat once it was mature and the R600g was the new and fresh AMD driver. AMD's official open-source team pretty much has their hands full working on RadeonSI-related matters for GCN GPUs, but some community members are still at work on R600g improvements. In particular, Glenn Kennard and David Airlie are among the developers that are still putting in time on R600g.

Some new work to report on this week for R600g includes doubles support for CYPRESS and CAYMAN. David Airlie noted, "Only a subset of AMD GPUs supported by r600g support doubles, CAYMAN and CYPRESS are probably all we'll try and support, however I don't have a CYPRESS so ignore that for now."

Other recent work includes multiple streams for ARB_gpu_shader5, multiple streams in the SB back-end, streams in the assembler, and an assortment of other changes.

At the moment in Mesa 11.1-devel Git, R600g still needs to finish up the ARB_gpu_shader5, ARB_gpu_shader_fp64, and ARB_tessellation_shader support. Those are some big ticket items but at least these recent commits work towards their goals. For OpenGL 4.1, R600g is currently missing GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit.