Intel Mesa OpenGL Driver Lands 48-bit Addressing Support, Lets Up To ~256TB Of vRAM

Intel's i965 Mesa OpenGL driver now allows for 48-bit addressing, which greatly expands the GPU memory limits.

Intel developer Kenneth Graunke landed his support in the i965 Mesa driver for 48-bit addressing. 48-bit address space for most GPU objects is allowed with Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer.

Notably this ups the limit from around 4GB of GPU video memory to now a theoretical maximum of around 256TB... It's unlikely you are going to see this much RAM on your systems anytime soon let alone addressable GPU memory, but now there is this support in place.

This comes after the Intel ANV Vulkan driver already plumbed in 48-bit address space support for Gen8+ and now the i965 Mesa OpenGL driver has followed through. The change is there for Mesa 18.1-devel.