Freedreno Gallium3D as the open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware has switched to using NIR by default.

Freedreno has long supported NIR as a native IR but required setting an environment variable while the default intermediate representation was Gallium3D's TGSI. Well, Freedreno compute shaders were already using NIR by default but not vertex and fragment shaders. With the latest Mesa Git today, TGSI is bypassed in using NIR by default.

Switching over to NIR happened now that Freedreno added an additional lowering pass and other changes needed to make the IR a better candidate. This is material to be found in this summer's Mesa 17.2 release.