Radeon Gallium3D Tackles A Bit More, OpenGL 4.1 Patches Pending

Recently, each day has been yielding a bit more of OpenGL 4.x support within Mesa/Gallium3D. The latest patches position the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for enabling OpenGL 4.1 compliance.

Mesa is on the heels of full OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support with the Nouveau Gallium3D driver already advertising OpenGL 4.1 support but that state varies based on the hardware drivers, with Intel and Radeon (R600 and RadeonSI) following close behind as detailed for easy viewing with the MesaMatrix.net.

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The latest work landing in mainline Mesa today benefits the Radeon Gallium3D code:

- GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted for RadeonSI and R600g. This extension is mandated by OpenGL 4.5.

- interpolateAt functions for RadeonSI. These interpolation functions are prep work for advertising ARB_gpu_shader5 as needed by OpenGL 4.0 in Mesa.

Perhaps most interesting though are some patches not yet merged but newly published to the Mesa-dev list:

- An Intel developer posted the missing bits for ASTC support. ASTC is the royalty-free, next-generation texture compression standard that will hopefully one day unseat the patented S3TC texture compression method. Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression is backed by Khronos for OpenGL and OpenGL ES and was also added to Microsoft's Direct3D 11.3/12.0.

- David Airlie posted Enabling OpenGL 4.1 for RadeonSI. All the pieces are now filled in within Mesa as long as the user is running LLVM 3.7 or newer for the latest AMDGPU LLVM back-end support. This means that (assuming the patch lands timely) the Mesa 11.0 release in September will offer OpenGL 4.1 support on this open-source driver for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and newer.